On February 2, our head of marketing, Ian Slipp, and I had a great time doing a Facebook Live session on behalf of INMA.

The theme of our session was based around our digital video playbook, a guide that our SendtoNews team put together to help support publishers better engage, retain, and enhance their audiences with digital sports video and then monetise it.

The main message is very simple: You should no longer publish any article or editorial without adding a relevant video to it.

There are three simple reasons for this:

• Your audience spends 88% more time on a page with video.
• Posts with video are shared 12 times more than without.
• You make way more money on a video than you do on display.

Many publishers will look at getting a video on every page as a very daunting task. Between production resources and ensuring editors are integrating the content, it can be a huge task to get video content on millions of pages across your site.

While native video content can be an attractive solution, a recent study by eMarketer found quality of content and adequate resources were prime barriers to its success. Plus, as discussed in a previous post, non-rights-held content can fall flat with your viewers and actually provide less revenue than you would receive with a third-party provider.

The good news is you have many video partners willing to help.

• Partners like Tout or Inform have a very broad library of content supported by advertising, revenue, and automation.
• Partners like Vemba have the platform to help you automate video insertion across the majority of your articles and allows you to use your own monetisation.
• Partners like SendtoNews acquire valuable and expensive syndicated sports rights and offer you that great content free of charge with a generous revenue share without you having to contribute any resources.

The bottom line is you can automate and monetise every single page you have with relevant video. If you have the resources and content, native content is a great option. Many publishers find success with the ease and revenue returns of video providers.

Whether you need general news, politics, travel, cooking, entertainment, or sports, there are a ton of resources out there to help satisfy the thirst for video content your audience has. You simply need to match the right content with your audience in order to maximise engagement and ultimately revenue.

Sports highlights is a great example because, while the content is available in a broad way through multiple channels providing a talking head review, nothing beats watching highlights of the top dunks from previous night or the replay of that great catch to keep your audience engaged and, most importantly, hooked to come back after the next game.

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