There is a young, local audience on social media that isn’t aware of the stories that make Long Island the place it is today. With local news being more important than ever, we feel it’s our mission to curate content for this audience in a digestible, relatable, and informative way.

We revamped our YouTube strategy, paying close attention to what resonated most with our audience, which resulted in a 60% increase in our following and a 214% year-over-year increase in overall video views. As a result, we exposed our content to new, young, and diverse audiences more regularly, which also led to digital subscription sales.

After learning that Shorts were the new way for videos to be discovered, we used this to our advantage to repurpose our vertical video content, hoping it would find a new audience on that platform.

We had already revamped our video strategy on Instagram Reels and TikTok and started experimenting with which vertical content performed best on Shorts compared to these other platforms. We also paid close attention to SEO and optimised our descriptions and titles.

Taking a more conversational approach wasn’t performing well on YouTube, but it is a strong strategy of ours on Instagram and TikTok.

The long game

After becoming more selective with the long-form videos we posted on YouTube, we saw the average watch time performance increase by 10%.

We noticed that our audience watched longer videos that explained cases such as the Gilgo Beach Killings, interviews with well-recognised individuals such as those featured on Long Island TikTawk, the cost of living on Long Island, and documentaries about cold cases across Long Island.

Simultaneously, we started streaming local press conferences live through YouTube and noticed that our audience really cared about hearing from law enforcement officials about high-profile cases happening on the Island. 

We noticed the strategy with vertical video was different; the best way to get your stories seen by new people who may not already engage with your page was through short-form content. So, we used Shorts as a funnelling tool, providing our audience with just enough information to learn something but left them wanting to know more.

The ultimate key was getting discovered by new, young, and diverse audiences who came across the content naturally in their feed. We then used long-form, horizontal videos as a strategy to keep those new subscribers engaging with stories that provided more in-depth coverage.

How it went

By implementing this new, focused strategy on YouTube, we brought more attention and awareness to our Web site and to NewsdayTV. As a result, we garnered over 48 million video views and drove about 3,000 Newsday digital subscription sales for the year. 

Our subscriber growth on YouTube also saw an increase of 325% year-over-year. To put that into perspective, in all of 2023, we gained a total of 4,000 subscribers with 2 million video views; in 2024, we gained 17,000 subscribers with over 8 million video views.

Shorts was our acquisition strategy, whereas long-form video was our retention strategy. With this approach, we were able to collaborate with our newsroom, pitching them new local angles to these topics, and as a result, seven of our top 10 YouTube videos for all of 2024 were local stories that made a big impact on our audience’s lives.

The new strategy also led us to experiment with different approaches to storytelling and use short-form to promote long-form video content. In 2023, we launched a project called Long Island TikTawk that shared how local content creators have used TikTok to grow their careers and amplify their voices.

After season one of TikTawk was a success, we created season two in 2024, and each interview lived on YouTube as a long-form piece of content. We then clipped shorter videos from those interviews that were engaging and posted those as Shorts to expose that content to new viewers, linking to the long-form interviews.

That effort contributed to season two’s success, which brought in over 787,000 video views across social platforms.

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