In the recent past, there has been an incredible rise in the way we consume content, and specifically in how we stay updated with the happenings across the globe. There has been an exponential rise of Social Media Platforms as a legitimate source of news.
With the use of social media, there has been a steady rise in consumption of other forms of media- specially, video content. I would say it’s nothing short of the newspaper of the wizarding world, ‘The Daily Prophet’.
With stories being introduced to almost every social media platform, visual content has become more powerful than ever. Some companies are actively pursuing & adapting to this change.
One such Company, is Brut, which started just 4 years ago in 2016 but has branded itself as the first media offering to be ‘100% digital, 100% video’. The word ‘Brut’ translates to ‘Raw’ and it was launched during the French presidential election in October 2016, at which point, its 90-second news videos on politics and society garnered millions of views.
The perk of the brand is that it is fully distributed and focuses entirely on video distributed via social media and in less than a year established itself as one of the most prominent digital-born news media. Even currently, the company has expanded to multiple countries and it publishes content actively on Instagram, Youtube, Facebook and Snapchat, to name a few. In India, Brut is reportedly the fastest-growing digital video publisher of the country.
The way these platforms have expanded so much in such a small span of time really provides a different angle to the social constructs we have built over time. Such an expansion can be observed in several companies across the globe but the real question is how do they do it and what are the challenges they face.
In a study carried out by Reuters and Oxford based researchers, titled, The Expansion of Digital-Born News Media, some key findings of the same were recognized. The three main findings are as follows.
First, several of the internationally oriented digital born news media have used a combination of on-site and off-site distribution, often involving aggressive search engine optimization and social media promotion coupled with content that is free at the point of consumption. The analysis of the finding highlights that this is an effective strategy to build large audiences across multiple countries, generally on the basis of a much leaner organization than most legacy media.
Second, the business model of most internationally oriented digital-born news media is based on digital display advertising. Unlike in domestic digital-born news media and among newspapers, pay or member models are rare and most continue to pursue advertising revenues (including increasingly through sponsored content and video).
Hence, most internationally oriented digital-born news media remain in investment and growth mode, and have not been consistently profitable. The content creators have to consistently look at new ways to increase profits.
Third, while expansion across multiple markets has enabled internationally oriented digital-born news media to expand their audience, this expansion also comes with challenges, and involves dealing with the tension between globalising and localising pressures, decisions about whether to partner or go alone, maintaining consistency in branding and tone across multiple editions and languages catering to sometimes very different markets, and the challenges of coordinating global newsrooms – challenges to which several of our case organisations are in turn developing technological responses.
In conclusion, I would quote British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Let’s see what magic the New Daily Prophet has in store for us.
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