Online Video Companies Find New Audiences—And New Challenges—In Pandemic

If anyone seems well positioned to thrive in a world desperately turning to online entertainment to pass the time in self-isolation, it would seem to be the companies already doing online entertainment. And indeed, huge new audiences are sampling their content in many cases. 

“It’s a nice silver lining given the situation we’re in,” said Justin Killion, general manager of Complex Networks and EVP of operations and content services, of his company’s big jump in viewership across its YouTube, TikTok, and other channels. 

Watch time on YouTube’s live streams jumped 19 percent in the two weeks around the initial lockdown in many U.S. states (March 12 to March 25) compared to the previous two weeks, according to a Tubular Labs analysis. It already had been trending upward significantly since the start of the year, from around 2 billion minutes watched a week to well over 3 billion.

And Facebook live-streaming views went crazy in that two-week period, up 37 percent, part of a shift that had seen views there more than triple since the start of the year, according to Tubular. 

Complex, known for original video series such as the hot-sauce-swilling talk show Hot Ones and its deep dives on sneaker collectors and other pop subcultures, reacted to the pandemic challenges before they fully hit.

The company hurried to finish seasons of its shows on basic cable channels such as TruTV and FYI, Killion said. It also adapted other material to accommodate new limits on production, began developing a dozen new formats, and added dozens of freelancers to help produce it all. 

There’s even been some unexpected dividends amid the new production challenges. For one, lower audience expectations on production values have made it less expensive to try out new show ideas, Killion said.

“We are taking this opportunity to capitalize on the ability to pilot new shows,” Killion said. “We can create and put them out at a time where the audience is more forgiving. The quality of the content needs to still be high, but the quality of video can be less.”

Not everything is peachy, at Complex or with other companies that got their start with online video.

Some Complex shows that used to have five-camera shoots in studio now are being recorded on Zoom webinars. The long-term replay and resale value of those shows is probably nil, Killion said, so he’s told their creators to not worry about hitting a syndication-friendly 39-minute show length for now.

Other shows have needed repurposing. For instance, a behind-the-scenes online series called Life at Complex no longer has scenes at Complex to go behind. Instead, producer/host Tony Lee came up with quarantine-friendly alternatives, like having staffers face off in Sneaker Battle, where they compete over who has the coolest shoes in their closets. 

Pigeons & Planes, a Complex show focused on up-and-coming musicians, has launched a Spotify playlist called Cooped Up, trying to give some of those artists more visibility at a time when they can’t perform live anyplace but online. That’s part of a broader audio initiative that includes four podcasts, including one exclusive to Spotify.

Complex also is tapping data, and a new way to carve up that data, as developed by Tubular, whose new digitaal taxonomy breaks down content into 3 million topics across 1,500 categories. 

The new taxonomy, like a Dewey Decimal system for web video, tracks what’s hot, even if it’s coming from a show or talent normally known for something else.

One odd example: the 10-Minute Cakes site also scores highly for its hairstyling videos. Both topics are actually hot here in mid-pandemic, as self-isolators experiment with baking and ponder how to get a socially distant haircut. Data on that sort of overlap can help competing creators looking for new programming ideas, and steer advertisers to new outlets and audiences for their products. 

“We want to give confidence to creators and advertisers,” said Tubular’s CEO Rob Gabel. “Companies like Complex use it to come up with an idea, or to validate an idea they have. When you have more information, you can make more informed decisions” about new programming.

Analysis of early trends in quarantine programming showed a big jump in health and fitness videos across social media, especially body-weight exercises, as well as “architecture content,” including room makeovers, Gabel said. Hobbies such as dancing (especially dance challenges), painting and drawing have taken off too. 

At Sinclair-owned hybrid AVOD service STIRR, GM Adam Ware can precisely point to when everything changed. 

“I track it to the Indian Wells (pro tennis tournament) cancellation,” said Ware, who also runs Sinclair’s sports network the Tennis Channel. “The week of (March) 9th, all of a sudden, we started to see this spike. We saw overall, a total 83-percent increase (in viewership) over three weeks among daily users.”

Other stats such as sessions and video plays are up similar amounts, while the weekly app downloads of the service on connected TVs and smart devices more than quadrupled, from 15,000 per week to 68,000 by the last week in March, Ware said. That’s pushed total downloads of STIRR’s apps to more than 2 million after 15 months of operation.

“People were now home, looking for two things, entertainment and news, but local news,” which STIRR provides by connecting users to the online streams of nightly news from many of Sinclair’s 190 broadcast TV stations, Ware said. 

The company also created a COVID-19 channel that runs live news conferences from the White House and various governors and other local officials.

The COVID-19 Channel runs live from 9 am Eastern Time until something like 8 pm Pacific Time every weekend, ending whenever the last official news conferences wrap up. Now, it’s STIRR’s third- or fourth-most-watched channel, Ware said. 

At Studio71, which has been doing digital-content production and talent management since 2007, the COVID-19 outbreak has been a good-news, bad-news experience, according to co-founder and President Dan Weinstein.

On the one hand, viewership has been huge for the Studio71 programming online, close to 11 billion views a month on YouTube, “never mind everyone else,” Weinstein said. But with Google
GOOGL
’s ad revenues closer to flat, that just means AdSense dollars get split more ways, meaning less money. The result is the company is “in a bit of triage right now.”

Some of its programs have been hit by the halt in live production, like The Real Bros of Simi Valley, which couldn’t complete work on three episodes.

And a promising push into tabletop games faces several challenges: the Chinese factories that make game pieces haven’t been operating; specialty game retailers are closed; and games that would be great for groups of adults may not appeal to a family with three young kids.

But other opportunities are presenting themselves, Weinstein said.

Studio71 is mining its deep library of existing content, repurposing the material into new forms that can be shown on ad-supported VOD services on Roku and Amazon’s Prime Video, “creating new revenue for not a lot of extra work,” Weinstein said.

And there are still deals to be done, like a slate of shows for Instagram’s IGTV, similar to one Studio71 had previously done with Facebook. And other deals may be coming down the pike as subscription video services look to fill their own holes in production schedules.

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