by Jacqueline Koch | May 11, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
HelloGiggles.com seems to have cracked the code on creating content for millennial women. After a flight from San Francisco, participants on the 2016 Digital Innovators’ Tour assembled in the beautiful conference room at HelloGiggles’ designer offices in downtown Los Angeles to meet general manager, Penelope Linge. She told the group that the site was started by actress Zooey Deschanel as a blog because she felt there was a lack of positive content and a safe place for young women to gather online. Today, the site whose audience’s median age is 26, reaches more than 30 million millennial women a month. HelloGiggles.com was acquired by Time Inc in October last year.
According to Linge, content is sourced from a contributor network of 1,000 millennial women from whom 50 to 60 pieces of content are sourced each day. The common differentiating thread across all of this content is a positive narrative. Traffic to the site comes from mobile and social channels. ‘Our audience is so young, we had to design for mobile and social first, because this is the engagement pattern for young people. They live their lives on the phone and on their social platforms,” said Linge. Fully embracing social channels, It may be surprising to know that Linge anticipates that in 24 to 36 months, most content will not live on hellogiggles.com. “We are embracing a distributed content model with most of our articles being hosted as Facebook Instant Articles via an RSS feed as well as the other channels our audience engages with. We will still be able to monetize this content,” she said.
Linge says the HelloGiggles team is seeing the same trend on Snapchat. “Facebook is our number platform and we are investing in creating original content for this channel. We are an official partner for Facebook Live and we are embracing Facebook Instance Articles because of the amazing user experience. Pages load instantly and we’ve seen a significant traffic increase. “According to Linge, the same level of engagement has not been possible on Twitter with this audience in spite a posting 40 tweets a day. “Snapchat is where we are the most bullish.” She said. This is because 14 to 20 year-olds are on Snapchat all day. Linge is hiring a Snapchat-focused team that will create content including video and invite advertisers to participate. She is quick to stress that the team is equally bullish about other social channels.
HelloGiggles Content strategy
HelloGiggle’s content strategy is not one-size-fits-all. Instead, the team creates content for each channel. With Facebook, for example, the audience doesn’t listen to sound – while they are at work or in line at the coffee shop – they want captioning. So the team focuses on creating videos every woman can relate to.
A recent example is a funny short video titled: ‘If you suck at putting on eyeliner’ which shows a young woman applying eyeliner to each eye and then returning over and over again to make corrections until she ends up putting sunglasses on over a wiped clean face.
“We are hoping we can create videos that we can take to advertisers, said Linge. The opportunity is to add a front card or tail card with the brand’s information. “We are also creating original videos for them because we are proving we know this space,” she said.
With recent Facebook Live Videos the team has created, there have been 20,000 – 30,000 people watching the live videostream and asking questions. ‘We have looked at what Buzzfeed is doing and recognized that Live Video is doing very well for them,’ she said.
Linge and her team are testing across platforms and trying to figure out what is next. ‘I think Snapchat is a greenfield opportunity for publishers and we are hoping to define what it means to be a publisher on Snapchat
Because HelloGigglees’ audience has not embraced paying for content, Linge said the team realized that heavily commercial sponsored content will not work on the site. ‘Millennials have never seen advertising and this generation does not see a quid pro quo for advertising. That is why we try to create a lot of organic video that doesn’t feel sponsored, but is brought to you by a brand’
Brands want content that will go viral and according to Linge, this audience is turned off if content feels too commercial. Instead, the team is creating premium video series and bringing in sponsors. This content is then distributed across multiple channels on the web including hellogiggles.com. This makes HelloGiggles both a content creator and a distribution channel.
Solutions for advertisers
A growing part of the business for HelloGiggles is creating premium branded content for advertisers.
“There are so many ways for young
women to find out who they are today. Kids can pick from thousands and thousands of identities. Zoe tapped into that zeitgeist. Our narrative, therefore, is find your freedom to explore who you are and embrace that. This is the messaging we are taking to advertisers,” she said.
HelloGiggles’ content creation team consists of 10 staff writers aged between 22 and 28 who edit contributor content. If something breaks and editors are looking for immediate coverage, this team also writes original content. Currently there are 4 video producers on staff, but this team will be ramping up fast.
by Jacqueline Koch | May 2, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
It was a long and winding road that brought Stackla co-founders Robb Miller, Peter Cassidy and Damien Mahoney from Sydney, Australia to an office in San Francisco which is where participants on the 2016 Digital Innovators’ Tour met Peter yesterday.
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It all began when Cassidy was working for the digital rights holder to the National Rugby league and Miller was working for the League itself. All three founders had a keen appreciation for the challenges organisations face around content and to use content to engage fans.
After winning a services contract to create content for the rugby league, the trio teamed up to start an agency. “We were creating 40 long form articles a day and many videos and we quickly realised the more effort and time we put into content creation, the less traction it got. In fact, long form pieces got less engagement that short videos,” Cassidy told Tour participants.
“We wondered what would happen if we flipped the model around and instead of competing with the content on social networks, the answer was to embrace it instead,” he said. This led to the idea to create technology that enables publishers and brands to collect existing user-generated content and use it as a powerful source of information. And that was when Stackla was born.
“We pitched the idea to an Australian broadcaster who had the rights to the Tour de France and were surprised when they said they would buy it,” he said. The new company then quickly pulled a prototype together and launched the company in time for the 2012 Tour de France in 2012 to great success for the broadcaster.
On the basis of this early validation, a new engineering team was assembled in Sydney who started to build the technology platform. The next year, the company set up an office in London and a year or so later, the founders moved to San Francisco to set up the US operations.
Stackla: The problem of fragmented content
According to Cassidy, the team saw that content marketing was becoming increasingly important to brands and after being approached by agencies to help them with brand content, Stackla expanded their focus beyond publishers to include brands.
“What we were seeing is that publishers and brands are creating content and then using social media as a distribution channel. At the same time, organic reach is diminishing which means that today, you really have to pay-to-play.” But the key question remained: Is this driving the right people to the right destination at the right ROI?
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by Jacqueline Koch | May 2, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
How do medium-sized publishers take advantage of revenue opportunities offered by online video without taking on the prohibitive costs associated with building out their own video production capabilities? This is the problem that four-year old San Francisco startup, Tout, set out to solve.
Participants on the 2016 Digital Innovators’ Tour got a first-hand account of how Tout is changing online video distribution from CEO and founder, Michael Downing.
Downing pointed out that many publishers are having a hard time making the transition from a print paradigm to more of a television paradigm. That is because today, 125 websites are driving 95 per cent of the US$9bn of revenue that online video is generating. “We are trying to democratise continent distribution by providing technology, content and expertise to allow a larger group of publishers to participate in the online video revenue opportunity,” he said.
Tout: How does it work?
Tout works with large video content publishers like television stations who need to find new ways to distribute their content beyond their own web properties. “For large content creators, online advertising is the largest source of digital revenue but they have run out of space to carry more ads. Syndication is important for continued growth,’ he said.
Then Tout works with mid-tier publishers who do not have the in-house capabilities to create their own video content. These publishers make all the articles they publish available to the Tout platform where the text is scanned. The platform then identifies which videos are relevant for each targeted article and the video is seamlessly integrated into the story.
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by Jacqueline Koch | Apr 7, 2016 |
Now that 2016 is off to a running start, it’s a good time to take a step back and look at some of the social media trends that are expected to make an impact this year. From livestreaming on social media platforms to enhanced image search on Pinterest, there are some exciting developments that are transforming how users interact with social media.
Livestreaming on social media
Real-time streaming is one of the biggest trends hitting social media this year. Companies as diverse as VISA and Spotify are using livestreaming applications like Meerkat and Periscope to drive deeper engagement with their customers who continue to crave intimacy and immediacy.
And the cost of entry remains low because livestreaming apps turn a phone’s camera into a live-streaming device, broadcasting everything it sees to a user’s Twitter followers with the tap of a button. In January, Twitter-owned Periscope took livestreaming one step further by integrating with GoPro to let its 10 million users broadcast to their followers from an action camera connected to an iPhone.
Paul Ronzheimer, a journalist from German publication Bild, used Periscope to help Syrian refugees tell their stories to the publication’s readers. ‘Periscope’s features include the ability for viewers to comment during the broadcasts, which in this case often included questions that the refugees could answer live and unmediated,’ he said.
On a lighter note, BuzzFeed recently used Meerkat to live-stream the ‘vigil’ for Zayn Malik—a teen-driven, reaction to the pop singer leaving the group One Direction.
Facebook has also joined the livestream party with Facebook Live. According to Facebook Live team members Vadim Lavrusik and Dave Capra, on average people watch a video more than three times longer when it is live compared to when it is not. To share a live video, users simply tap ‘What’s on your mind?’ at the top of their News Feed and select the Live Video icon. With 1.5 billion users, Facebook is sure to be a driving force behind the adoption of livestreaming on social platforms this year.
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