At the recent Video Ad Summit, I sat down with Rahul Chopra, News Corp's SVP/global head of video and Chief Revenue Officer of Storyful, which was recently acquired. Rahul has been a key executive behind the Wall Street Journal's highly successful online video strategy and implementation.
As Rahul explains, the Journal is now producing 150 hours of video per month, delivering 50 million streams across 35 different platforms. Content is created from every one of its international bureaus, which is released and promoted on a 24-hour cycle to match audience interests.
From an ad sales perspective, Rahul details how video is now part of a holistic go-to-market approach which advertisers are responding to. Inventory has been sold out for a long time and CPM are still rising and are very strong (Rahul would only share the numbers with me privately, but they are eye-popping).
Rahul also describes how Storyful is extending both the Journal's and others' newsrooms' capabilities by providing fast access to user-generated video that's contextual to current news stories. Key to the model is that Storyful fully vets the video for authenticity.
All in all, the Journal and News Corp's other properties have become leaders in premium online video by leveraging incumbent talent and brands along with new technologies, distribution and devices. The results are striking and there's still lots of growth ahead.
Categories: Events, Newspapers
Topics: News Corp., VideoNuze 2014 Online Video Advertising Summit, Wall Street Journal