Over the past year, news organisations have invested significantly in video including Periscope and Facebook Live. However, the Reuters Digital News Report 2016 revealed that online news videos are not performing as well as expected. On Tuesday, Reuters released a more detailed study of news video trends in the UK, US, Germany and Italy.
The Future of Online News Video, by Antonis Kalogeropoulos, Federica Cherubini and Nic Newman, finds that video news consumption represents a small proportion of overall time spent on news sites. Among a global sample of 50,000 people, 78 per cent never or only occasionally access a news video. Although online video is generally very popular, news is not a popular video genre. Among the surveyed news organisations, lifestyle or entertainment videos dominate consumption and the most popular videos on The Telegraph, The Guardian, and The Independent are about animals.
“The growth around online video news seems to be largely driven by technology, platforms, and publishers rather than by strong consumer demand”. Antonis Kalogeropoulos
Other key findings from the report include:
- Off-site news video consumption is growing fast – with Facebook a key focus of activity
- Some common key markers of success for off-site and social videos include brevity, the ability to play without sound, a focus on soft news and a strong emotional element
- Publishers are beginning to embrace online news video (79% of senior digital news leaders surveyed by the Reuters Institute at the beginning of 2016 said they would be investing more over the course of the year) – but most remain in an experimental phase
- The monetisation of news video remains the biggest challenge for news organisations. On-site monetisation continues to rely on pre-roll ads, despite acknowledgment that poor user experience affects growth.
Read the full report here.
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