It’s been just over three months since went live, and after the white heat of the launch period Executive Editor Bethan Jinkinson shares three things she has learnt over the past few weeks.
1. There’s a clear audience appetite for informative short-form factual digital video. Despite all the audience research and preparation we’d done, when we first launched we weren’t entirely sure there would be a market for our eclectic mix of short-form video spanning genres across philosophy, ethics, psychology, opinion, anthropology, archive etc. Would people be interested in the things we were interested in? Would they watch them, share them, engage with them? Thankfully the answer has been an emphatic yes. We’ve been blown away by the positive response from the audience to our content鈥�—鈥妛hether it’s been our on our ‘In My Humble Opinion’ strand featuring people like palliative care specialist Kathryn Mannix (‘’) to the amazing unsung heroine animator , to the quirky question we’ve all been wondering ‘?’. Of course not everything we do goes viral, but every day we learn more and more about what our audience likes and dislikes, and this definitely feeds into our production and commissioning thinking.
2. Completion rates on our platform are high. The second thing we’ve learnt is around completion rates. When we started we said we’d be producing and commissioning videos that were between 90 secs and 15 mins. Most of our videos are between 3 and 4 mins, but we’ve also been experimenting with a longer length鈥�—鈥奺g (6:09 mins) and (7:17 mins). Average completion rates for these on the 主播大秀 Ideas website are 63% and 67%鈥�—鈥奱nd overall our average is 65%. Some videos are as high as 80%. In a world of endless choice and ever shorter attentions spans, this feels a good place to be.
3. There’s a load of fantastic indie talent out there. And finally when we started we were keen to work with both internal and external suppliers. One of the big questions in my mind is there a short-form digital indie ecosystem that we could tap into? Would they ‘get’ what we wanted and be able to supply it within our budgets and to our specification? Thankfully the answer there is also an emphatic yes鈥�—鈥妛e’ve had two commissioning rounds so far with a total of around 315 pitches and 45 commissions. Cordelia Hebblethwaite our commissioning editor is working with range of different companies, many from the smaller end of the industry, which is great, as well as several predominantly tv or radio indies who are moving into digital.
I could go on about these learnings (or lessons, as the 主播大秀 Ideas product manager Lloyd Shepherd prefers to call them :-)), but three seems a good number to stop at for now.
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