For publishers, short-form vertical video has often proven something of a headache over the past few years. Audience enthusiasm for the format has exploded, primarily through TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Reels, and some mainstream publishers have found traction on these platforms. But while that success has brought engagement, publishers have little control over monetisation or the user experience on those social apps, hence why vertical video has in many cases been something of an ambivalent investment.
Over the past couple of years, a number of media companies have tried to bring that short-form vertical video viewing back within their own walls. The BBC, the New York Times, Bild, and USA Today have all launched vertical video offerings, either as standalone apps or integrations within existing products. Last month, contextual ad business Media.net launched its own vertical video product for publishers called ‘Bytes’, designed to make it easier for more companies to bring vertical video on-site. It’s had a strong reception from publishers already, with Hearst, TIME, People, and Trusted Media Brands among those who have either gone live or are in the process of integrating Bytes.
Part of the motivation behind this launch is giving publishers more control over the monetisation and presentation of short-form video. But as those involved explained to VideoWeek, it’s not just about bringing audiences back on-site, it’s about reimagining the ways those audiences interact with big publishing brands.
A tech spine for vertical video
The aim with launching Bytes, according to Media.net, was to give open web publishers a vertical video tech backbone which didn’t yet exist. Bytes provides the infrastructure to let publishers embed scrollable feeds of vertical video content, similar to what audiences are used to on TikTok, on their own open web properties. It also offers tools around content creation and monetisation, for those who want them. But Karan Dalal, Media.net’s COO, told VideoWeek his company was keen to give publishers flexibility and control over how they use the product.
For the basic question of how and where vertical video appears on a publisher’s site, Dalal said that Bytes offers a number of different options, and works on custom integrations with its partners. So while one publisher might have a widget which sits on the edge of a web page, another might present vertical video in their navigation bar, and another might choose to surface it at the end of a written article — there’s not one formula for what works.
Once publishers have a vertical video feed embedded in their site, they need video content to populate it with. Some will already have a bank of video suited to the format. Jonathan Hills, SVP of product at TMB (which owns Reader’s Digest, Taste of Home, and FailArmy, among others), said his publisher brands generally use content they’re already running on the social platforms. For those who have invested in short-form social, this provides a quick bank of content to use. (It also has the side benefit of providing data on how audiences interact with this content which publishers don’t typically get back from the platforms.)
For media businesses who aren’t already producing vertical video, Bytes offers tools to convert any horizontal assets they have to a vertical format. It also offers AI capabilities which generate video based on publishers’ written articles. “As an SSP, we know which articles users are visiting on a regular basis and which ones are popular, so we can automatically create AI-generated summaries of those articles and push those out,” said Dala.
Bytes then organises that content into scrollable feeds, surfacing whichever content is appropriate to the context and is likely to drive engagement. But again, control is key. Publishers opt in to AI generated content if they want to, and their editorial teams review anything before it’s pushed out to audiences. They can also create their own playlists, rather than using Bytes’ algorithm to order content, if they prefer.
Building a market for vertical video
Even on the monetisation front, despite the fact that Media.net runs its own SSP, Bytes lets publishers use their existing programmatic partners.
Monetisation presents unique challenges for the format, since while short-form vertical video is very popular with marketers, right now it mostly exists within the walled gardens. “There’s no open exchange demand for vertical video right now,” said Dalal. “So as an interim step, we’re currently supporting all forms of monetisation — display, horizontal video, and native — all of that gets built in, and we’re just one of the partners that sells into it like any other SSP can.”
Ultimately, this is a good problem to have, since it means once publishers can tap into the vertical video market, they’ll be competing for budgets which are currently won almost exclusively by the tech platforms.
And there is change on both the tech side and the agency side which should start opening up demand for publishers’ vertical video. “The DSPs are doing a really good job,” said Dalal. “We’ve had conversations with The Trade Desk, Amazon, Google — everybody is working on vertical video at the moment. We’ve also seen a massive amount of interest from agencies. Some have already started to transact vertical video with us. In those cases, they give us their assets and we run it as a managed service.”
Agency structures can be a barrier to investment, as often any vertical video buying will sit solely with social teams. But Dalal said he’s seeing some of the larger groups consolidating search, social and programmatic into common groups, breaking down these barriers.
Moving beyond static links
Regardless, both Dalal and Hills agreed that in the short-term, monetisation isn’t necessarily the primary focus anyway.
“I definitely believe that the money will follow user behaviour, and as more and more users adopt this type of format, that’s going to change how revenue flows too,” said Hills.
In the near term, the big challenge for publishers right now is developing stronger, stickier relationships with their audiences. Many media companies are reporting that the introduction of AI overviews into search, alongside growing adoption of standalone AI tools, is drying up search referrals. So publishers have to make sure audiences come directly to their websites, and stay once they’ve arrived.
“It’s definitely about driving sticky behaviour with our users,” said Hills. “We want to find ways to have them stay with us longer, and come back more frequently. And what we’re seeing with some of the early tests is that people are engaging with more video content per session, which is really encouraging. What we’re trying to do is give our audiences a curated experience with content they can trust and which relates to them, and that just makes their experience much better. Most brands are trying to drive stronger relationships with our users, and I think vertical video helps us get there.”
Dalal agreed that the early data has been positive. “Users who enter the experience are definitely staying and consuming more content,” he said. “And from an ad perspective, while the data is not yet large enough to make big conclusions, we’re seeing eCPMs for display ads which are materially higher than standard display CPMs. They’re three to five times higher than traditional CPMs, because users are more immersed in this experience, it’s a higher attention format.”
This impact could increase further as publishers rethink the entire consumer experience to integrate vertical video in more dynamic ways across their properties.
Bytes is already trialling a few integrations for vertical video which create more interactive relationships between video and the rest of a publisher’s content. For example, a publisher might present video in a widget, which can then be expanded to the full page, which the user can then scroll through. Then from that video content, they might be led back to an article related to the content they watched within that video feed.
“I think this helps us rethink how video becomes part of a website in a different, more interesting way,” said Hills. “Over the years, what we’ve mostly seen is that video is promoted via a static badge on a page, which then opens up video on a separate page when you click on it. This gives us new ways, from an interface perspective and a user experience perspective, to inject video across the platform in a more interesting way for users.”
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