YouTube hits and misses & the secret email strategy: world-building around your show
Little Dot Studios, Jungle and Spirit Studios execs on world-building around your show
It’s not just you: it’s hard to make money online. The traditional TV commissioning model may not be the meritocracy the industry needs it to be, but in many ways, it’s a hell of a lot easier than cracking YouTube.
As strategist and Business of TV author Jen Topping detailed at Indielab’s recent Content Futures event, emerging producers struggling to monetise on platforms such as YouTube aren’t missing a trick: among a host of other challenges, there is an enduring gulf between the advertisers and CPMs (cost per 1,000 impressions) on social platforms versus what is spent on linear channels. It’s “why you have to run so much harder online at the moment to make money relative to television,” according to Topping.
Yet speakers including Little Dot Studios’ MD of network social platforms Alex Hryniewicz, Jungle’s chief growth officer Jade Raad and Spirit Studios co-founder Peter Cowley stressed to the Content Futures audience that there are ways to work smarter in the digital content economy. Increasingly, it takes more than just creative excellence to get a show off the ground: producers need a hybrid strategy that considers the entire ecosystem, and meets the audience where it is.
In this week’s Indie Hustle, we look at some of the pillars of the new content ecosystem, and reveal the top five things everyone needs to know about working with YouTube and brands, going “direct to consumer” and diving into vertical video.
We hear from Little Dot Studios about the do’s and don’ts of sweating assets on YouTube; social and influencer agency Jungle about what brands really need from producer partners; and Spirit Studios about gamifying your content for vertical video. (We’ll have more next week from Goalhanger’s senior memberships manager Hannah Rashbass and Cold Glass co-founders Ben Kerr and Sam Cocker, producers of Waitrose’s Dish podcast, on how to build communities around your ideas and expand into live events.)
Read on to find out:
Why long-form content pays off on YouTube in the long term
The content black holes (including true crime) you need to avoid on YouTube
Why a recurring audience matters more to brands than a hit show
Why every production company needs to sort out its email strategy
How to gamify your vertical content for maximum impact
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