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The business and lifestyle publisher Insider, an Axel Springer property, has notched a number of key milestones in its video consumption over the last two months. That’s thanks to a larger shift in its content strategy, one that the company hopes to translate into increased advertising revenue.
The publisher broke its internal record for total watch time on YouTube in July and again in August, generating 1.16 billion minutes in July and 1.2 billion minutes in August, according to president Barbara Peng. As a metric, watch time represents the cumulative duration that viewers spend watching a video; YouTube displays the numbers privately to channel owners, and they are critical given that greater watch time means more ad opportunities.
Insider also saw more than half of that consumption occur on connected televisions—59% in July and 50% in August—a first for the company.
“This is the result of two trends coming together,” Peng said. “People are growing more accustomed to watching YouTube on television, and we are responding more to what kind of content people are watching.”
This comes as the digital media ecosystem more broadly reckons with questions surrounding the quality of digital video content.
Scandals stemming from a July report from the research firm Adalytics, as well as changing technical policies from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, have led ad buyers to think more critically about how they allot their video budgets.
Meanwhile, publishers and marketers have rushed to embrace CTV, which, despite the immaturity of its data infrastructure, yields higher CPMs and continues to gain in viewership.
According to Comscore, the number of CTV hours per household watched rose from 9.6 billion to 11.5 billion between 2022 and 2023, a 21% uptick.
And video revenue—including advertising, as well as licensing, social partnerships and other attendant lines of business—currently makes up 15% of Insider’s overall revenue, according to Peng.
“If you have the ability to stand up and retain a video audience outside of your owned-and-operated, the CPMs are incredible,” said Brian Cullinane, the chief revenue officer at video aggregator VideoElephant. “The challenge is getting seen.”
Watch time and episodic content
According to Peng, Insider was able to increase the consumption of its YouTube videos not by increasing the volume of its output—it produced roughly 80 videos last month, as is its standard—but by changing the kind of video it produces.
Rather than emphasize short-form or social video, beginning in 2020, the publisher began using watch-time as its north star metric. It also started weighing consumption data more heavily when making content decisions and investing in series that attract larger viewerships.
These shifts led the publisher to produce more episodic series, long-form video and original reporting, according to Peng, with many of its episodes running between eight to 25 minutes in length.
The resulting franchises, such as Risky Business, which chronicles dangerous jobs around the globe, and Food Wars, where hosts compare food items in different countries, translate better to CTV screens than bite-sized video. They also encourage repeat visits and typically generate longer watching sessions.
Risky Business, for example, has 117 episodes and more than 5 million cumulative views. One recent episode, US vs. UK McDonalds, was released one month ago and has 1 million views.
Other series, such as So Expensive, which examines why certain goods and services are able to sell for high costs, and World Wide Waste, which details some of the more wasteful byproducts of modern living, translate the signature virality of the Insider brand into video.
CPMs on CTV
The CPMs on CTV are also typically higher than desktop or mobile viewing, even for the same content, according to U of Digital founder Shiv Gupta.
“Many advertisers specifically target CTV devices and are willing to pay a premium for the big screen, household, co-viewing, less skippable, high completion rate, maximum viewability real estate in the living room,” Gupta said.
Still, a number of factors can affect the final CPM, and Insider declined to specify whether its increased consumption of CTV has led to more advertising revenue.
The depressed economic climate has lowered advertising demand across the board, and ad revenue on CTV can be subject to multiple intermediaries—including device providers like Roku and Samsung, according to John Rogers, the vice president of business development at Nexxen.
“The raw CPMs of CTV are higher, but if you only get a share of a share of a share, the takeaway pay can end up pretty even,” Rogers said.
