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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.”