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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
Economist video strategy success with Insider | Fifth of News UK website traffic ‘non-human’
And head of news at S&P Global Market Intelligence shares insights on nuturing a niche audience worth billions
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👋 Hello from the team at Press Gazette on Wednesday, 23 September.
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👏 Has your journalism made a difference over the last year? Press Gazette’s British Journalism Awards for public interest journalism close for entries on Thursday at midnight. Find out more here.
📺 Like everyone else, The Economist is currently investing heavily in video – but doing so in its own way.
Economist Insider, which launched a year ago, offers an on-demand premium video experience for subscribers (with a limited amount of content made available for free on Youtube). Development was a year-long process which involved recording 50 pilot episodes (partly to figure out which writers were best suited to front-of-house work).
A weekly news show is presented by editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes with an additional show each week exploring geopolitics, defence, economics and technology.
Clips from Insider shows have been viewed more than 100 million times on social media and the content has improved subscriber retention by making them more likely to engage with digital content.
Executive editor Andrew Palmer told our Future of Media Technology conference why The Economist has not gone down the route of hiring outside talent or “creators” as part of its video strategy:
“We have a very coherent world view, so there’s danger in fragmented people coming in or outsiders coming in saying things on our platforms. So we have tended to fit the Insider into the rhythm of the existing newsroom.”
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🤖 At the same conference we also heard about bot-defence strategies at News UK and Daily Mail, which have both switched from block lists of bad bots to allow lists. Essentially, if your name isn’t down, you’re not coming in.
News UK chief technology officer Tom Jackson said rolling out advanced bot-blocking technology had deterred many attacks on the publisher’s sites. But 20% of News UK website traffic remains non-human.
He said they employ private bot security to “go off and hang out in the shady corners of the internet and the dark web in the chatrooms, hearing what the latest is on malicious bot scraping”.
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💷 And as I never tire of saying, there are riches in the niches, especially for S&P Global which generates some $5bn per year in revenue from its Market Intelligence division, which produces news for investors and high-powered business folk.