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On the first Monday in May, more than 53 million people across the globe tuned in to watch Vogue’s third livestream of the Met Gala, the annual fashion extravaganza that serves as both the primary source of funding for the museum’s Costume Institute and, increasingly, a tentpole event for Condé Nast.
Within the first 24 hours, the livestream doubled its reach from the year prior and notched an average watch time of 21 minutes, according to Anna-Lisa Yabsley, global digital strategy lead and executive director of content strategy at Vogue.
Over the seven-day period following the event, the publisher generated 1.2 billion video views and 650 million social video views—up 82% and 30% year over year, respectively.
The publisher broadcast the livestream across all of its 11 owned and operated Vogue websites, as well as on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and, for the first time, YouTube.
The continued growth of the Met Gala livestream and its attendant social footprint offer a case study in the blurring boundary between digital, social and linear video, as well as insight into the increasing nuance of publishers’ digital subscription strategies.
“The subscription side of it was new for us this year,” Yabsley said. “And we wanted to leverage the interest around the Met Gala to see what kind of subscription activity that drove for us.”
Flooding the zone
As viewership to traditional award show broadcasts continues to decline, Vogue has managed to grow its audience for three consecutive years, a testament to its “surround sound” approach to content strategy.
Rather than shepherd viewership to a designated medium, Vogue floods every major distribution channel to inject Met Gala content into whichever feed a user prefers.
To capitalize on this deluge of content, the publisher employed three primary strategies, according to Yabsley.
It streamlined content coordination across the global Vogue properties, ensuring that titles like Vogue Germany, India, Italy, Japan and Mexico had real-time access to the content coming from the event. In total, 48% of the content that appeared in Vogue U.S. was shared globally.
The publisher also placed more emphasis on its pre-event search engine optimization strategy. Drawing on the search equity of Vogue, it worked to capture more traffic from search inquiries related to the event, such as its history and how people could watch it.