Immediate’s magazines used to compete for newsstand space and Web site hits. Now they compete for watch time, ear time, and scroll time. This “liquid content” factory quietly shifted to video-first.

I recently found myself watching a historian explain what ordinary Tudors really ate. Not King Henry VIII’s banquets but everyday 16th-century life. 

The shift from wood to coal changed English kitchens and even the taste itself, as less smoke required more seasoning. The episode was filmed at a period townhouse in Wales. It is part of HistoryExtra magazine’s Tudor Life series with historian Ruth Goodman.

Following this U.K. magazine no longer means reading it or even engaging in one destination. It means watching long-form episodes, discovering short clips on Instagram or TikTok, listening to podcasts during a commute, and returning to the Web or app for deeper reading.

I still enjoy the printed edition on a sofa or on a plane, as 114,000 others did in 2025, or its digital edition in Apple News+ (33 million minutes in 2025), but the fastest growing channel for HistoryExtra is YouTube with 210,000 subscribers.

Immediate is part of German publishing group Burda Media and home also to Good Food, BBC Gardeners’ World, and Radio Times. The company enjoyed 1.2m magazine subscribers in total (print and digital), with 767k paid digital subscribers. 

It remains wildly profitable: In 2024, per the latest filing, it booked a 20% EBITDA margin on £180m revenue.

A business case for going video-first

A well-produced Tudor episode filmed on location costs more than publishing a Web article. The production involves travel, crew, planning, editing.

“Video is the hardest format to produce,” admitted Paul Doyle, director of video strategy and delivery. “But once you’ve captured it properly, it becomes the most flexible asset you have.”

From one core production Immediate derives:

• Long-form YouTube content with extended watch time.

• Vertical clips for high-frequency social feeds on Instagram or TikTok.

• Podcast audio for habitual listening.

• Searchable Web content, including articles and tweets.

• Material feeding print magazine and Apple News+ distribution.

Transcript-based editing and other AI-assisted workflows, e.g., chopping a long YouTube video into Instagram Reels, reduce the incremental cost of these derivatives. 

“The initial production might cost more or take more time, but repurposing lowers the overall cost per output,” explained Doyle. 

He warned though: “Liquid content works sometimes, but not always, because user intent differs by platform. For example, Victorian social history works on YouTube, but World War II works better as text or video on our Web site.” 

Quality in the age of AI and creators

Many news publishers see an opportunity in “liquid content” or, in other words, giving audiences a choice what format they wish to engage.

AI lowered the cost of versioning, e.g., conversion from video to text, or from text to audio, and audiovisual formats capture larger shares of daily media time than text.

For context, an average U.S. adult spends five hours watching content daily, almost three hours listening, and only one hour 27 minutes reading or browsing, per Activate Consulting. 

While Immediate increasingly starts with video as the original capture, others often start with text and automate outward. For example, Norway’s Schibsted and India’s Times Internet presented at INMA conferences in 2025 AI tools converting text articles into video at scale and speed.

This approach, while efficient, trades off quality of video, the most engaging format for consumers and the most valued by advertisers.

With generative AI, anyone can today produce content that looks professional, flooding supply and intensifying declines in traffic, engagement, and revenue for legacy publishers.

“Publishers get squeezed between AI and creators,” observed Professor Lucy Küng at last year’s News Rewired conference in London.

When we met recently, Immediate Chief Commercial Officer Christina Hawley offered a way out of that squeeze: “In a world of infinite content, people connect with people. Expertise and personality are what audiences remember.”

Video makes expertise visible. Historians, chefs, and gardeners become identifiable figures. Trust attaches to faces and voices. A high-quality original paired with efficient derivatives offers an edge in a commoditised market. 

AI can summarise Tudor-era recipes in seconds. It cannot replicate Ruth Goodman standing in a 16th-century kitchen in Wales.

Archive as a strategic asset

Evergreen content such as lifestyle or special interest also compounds in value over time while news value diminishes. 

• Readers’ interest in a typical big news topic lasts about seven days, per Google Trends. 

• Most news articles reach 80% of their pageviews within 24 hours of publication, and almost all run their course by the 48-hour mark, per Chartbeat.

A Tudor episode, a snake plant gardening guide, or a sheppard pie recipe may continue generating traffic and subscription value months or years later. It can resurface seasonally. It strengthens the archive.

For news publishers, archives remain valuable but often tied to specific events like elections. For magazine publishers with durable subject matters, archives function more like appreciating assets.

AI-assisted search increases the accessibility of that archive internally and fuels new workflows at Immediate. Each new production strengthens a searchable knowledge base that informs future video scripts, articles, newsletters, or social posts.

“We’ve got all this information in one warehouse, and it can spit it out in different ways,” Doyle said.

Magazine editor’s changing identity

Paul Doyle joined Immediate four years ago from TikTok, with experience in news broadcasting at UK’s BBC and Ireland’s RTÉ.

He entered a business built on strong institutional brands and deep subject expertise but largely text-first in its instincts and with anonymous editors.

“The biggest change wasn’t technical,” Doyle told me. “It was helping people see themselves differently.”

For many editors, authority meant a byline. Moving to video meant stepping in front of a camera, adapting to a different storytelling rhythm, and becoming publicly visible in ways print never required.

Immediate hired a small team of video specialists, but scale came from upskilling and reskilling. Journalists were trained to shoot and record with phones and DSLR cameras. Magazine production editors became video producers. 

Video specialists work with colleagues embedded within brands to raise production standards while keeping editorial ownership intact.

“We didn’t want a world where video was someone else’s job,” Doyle said.

Immediate’s Jess Burney is presenting at next week’s INMA Media Subscription Summit in Toronto. Following along for her presentation and more.

Banner photo: Adobe Stock By alphaspirit.

Greg’s Readers First newsletter is a public face of a revenue and media subscriptions initiative by INMA, outlined here. INMA members can subscribe here.

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