Big Publishers Find Success With Video
AdAge has an article on how traditional print publisher Condé Nast is finding success on Youtube.
Architectural Digest doesn’t seem like it was made for YouTube. After all, it’s an almost a 100-year-old design magazine concerned with luxury homes—no kids making slime or articles featuring K-Pop sensations–but in the past year the Condé Nast-owned publisher quadrupled its audience on YouTube.
Now, Architectural Digest has 1.4 million subscribers to its channel, as Condé Nast has re-calibrated its entire approach to the video site and digital platforms. This has helped reinvigorate other classic publications like Bon Appétit, which saw subscribers triple in the past year to 3.7 million.
Just scrolling through Architectural Digest’s channel shows how the publisher is thinking about YouTube differently. Before a year ago, most videos typically ran for one to three minutes, now shows run six to 10 minutes and longer.
So not only are they creating videos that promote their magazines, they also sell advertising on those promotional videos.
Condé Nast sells out of most of its YouTube ad inventory across all its channels, which reach 28 million subscribers, according to Drucker Mann, and that is an advantage it has over most creators on the Google-owned video site. Only major media partners like Condé Nast are even allowed to manage their own ads on YouTube, which mostly handles the ad insertions across the platform. For the top publishers, YouTube typically just fills the left-over inventory.
Smaller video creators can’t use the ad sales aspect in the same way Condé Nast does it, but there are other ways to monetize your videos. It’s time to get creative – start thinking about topics for your video series to promote your business, then look for partners you can split the cost with or sponsors you can promote in your videos (just be up-front about any sponsorships you have). Also be thinking about how you can grow the size of your audience. The more viewers you have, the more likely that other businesses will want to be involved in some way. Get going today!