CTV Festival Explores YouTube & App Curation

To explore successful YouTube channels and CTV apps, the Connected TV Festival today featured the insights from VA Media’s Mark Ashbridge, pocket.watch’s Brian C. Janes and Future Today’s Soma Sengupta.

Ashbridge, CEO of VA Media, which has built a thriving collection of YouTube channels; Janes, VP of distribution operations and IT at pocket.watch, home to an abundance of hit creator channels, two FAST channels and an SVOD platform; and Sengupta, head of partner relationships at Future Today, operator of the HappyKids and Fawesome apps, took part in the Channel Surfing session you can watch here.

VA Media operates 25 channels, Ashbridge said, with content sourced from majors and indies across the globe. “We have over 10,000 titles.”

Future Today has been licensing from studios, indies and YouTube creators for its HappyKids and Fawsome apps and syndicating that content to platforms on other OEMs.

At pocket.watch, meanwhile, the approach is to partner with YouTube content creators and bring that slate to other platforms. “We curate it, enrich it and package it, usually into 15-episode seasons we can then license out to different platforms.”

On the approach to partnering with YouTube creators, Janes noted, “We want to make sure that these creators align with our values. It’s very important that they’re committed to the well-being of any kids that are going to appear in their content, and ultimately that they are interested in protecting the well-being of the children that are watching the content. And then we’ll evaluate the franchise potential. Data drives our decisions. YouTube is a cornucopia of data. They give creators a lot of direct control over the information that they have about the performance of their channels and their videos.”

VA Media, meanwhile, has been working with creators on reaction videos “to the studio-based content that we license,” Ashbridge said. “That’s proven to be a really successful format. We have a large queer channel called We Are Pride, and we’ve working with creators on react videos and it’s all really humorous and fun. That’s worked well.”

FutureToday works with creators to diversify beyond YouTube, Sengupta explained. “First and foremost, we need to understand the content. We have subject matter experts who understand the content. We function in three different verticals: entertainment, kids and family and lifestyle. We have a set of best practices. We get the content ready for streaming, for a lean-back big TV experience. We clean up the content, get rid of any YouTube references and create a TV show format and then present it to our streaming audience.”

The key to driving up CPMs lies in quality curation and quality content, Ashbridge said. “We’ve moved to looking for a percentage of exclusive content. That gives us a competitive advantage on the platform. And then looking at the metrics of how it performs on the channel to increase the revenue. The shift in devices is really fascinating at the moment; 47 percent of our viewing now is coming from the home family room on smart TVs. Numbers and revenue from that device alone is far greater than mobile or tablet or desktop. We ensure we’re editing and packaging our content for longer-form viewing. And longer form viewing, as we all know, generates more revenue. Improved quality on YouTube is another thing that’s really going to drive that watch time.”

At Future Today, Sengupta said the company is using a mix of editorial and engineering strategies to lift up CPMs. “We use a lot of UI tweaks and new features to give our audience personalized recommendations so that we can bring them binge-worthy content. We always focus on bringing long-form formats that suit streaming to places on the app where the audience can discover them.”

Janes added, “What’s the value that we’re bringing to the advertisers themselves? We’re not necessarily starting from a place of how do we raise all these CPMs? It’s more, how do you build trust? How do we create a package that’s going to bring value and increase the deal size and reach a wider audience as efficiently as possible? We add value by providing high-value inventory and then responsive and proactive account management, and ultimately delivering successful campaigns. We are also interested in increasing our revenue. Connected TV viewership is on the rise. That is highly valuable versus our standard YouTube media because it is that co-viewing audience where parents and kids are sitting down together to watch shows. There’s a higher ad completion rate in that context. With our ability to target those devices, we’re looking at how can we bring that whole package of value into the space and give brands something that’s going to be delivered to their mission as well.”

pocket.watch is also exploring alternative revenue sources with an SVOD service, Ryan and Friends Plus. “A monthly subscription, growing 66 percent year over year, with over 200,000 active monthly users. It’s demonstrating that there’s very high demand for YouTube content, not just on YouTube, and it’s working very well for us.”

The conversation then moved to the issue of discovery. “It’s all about optimization,” Ashbridge said. “The technical metadata that you produce for the channel. Search is still a really big driver of discoverability. This year, we’ve been focusing on looking at AI-based thumbnailing. We have to get permission to alter some of that artwork, and that’s not always forthcoming, but when it is, we can see AI thumbnailing starting to improve our clickthrough rates.”

Ashbridge added that consistency in a publishing schedule is key, “and constantly monitoring what the reaction is.”

Search is also paramount at Future Today, Sengupta added. “We have a team that’s constantly deep diving into the different search strategies that work for connected TV. We are constantly doing A/B testing and tweaking metadata, using AI for enhancing thumbnails.”

YouTube’s rollout of shorts has impacted the discovery game, Janes said. While it has “split the discovery streams,” Janes said, “you’ve now got two places where people can go and start to engage with the content. Shorts are really useful for growing viewership, but they’re not great for growing revenue. It’s great for experimentation. It’s a great space to play in. And it’s great to use shorts as a complementary content type to your long-form content. One thing that we have noticed that doesn’t work so well is if you take a compilation of shorts and post that as a VOD long-form video, you’re not going to get as much engagement on that video as you might think.”

Ashbridge agreed, noting, “It’s definitely split audiences. We publish long-form content predominantly. We’ve been very cautious in terms of introducing short-form to what are high monetization, high engagement long-form channels. We’re looking at a dual strategy. Shorts is great for discoverability. It’s great for audience engagement. But it will impact your revenue on a channel if you allow it to override what your strategies and tactics are in the first place. We’re starting to run specific shorts channels in the movie space and splitting our audiences and their consumption habits. We’ll cross-publish some of that content onto some of our long-form channels, but it’s very selective.”

The session wrapped with a conversation about the use of analytics. “If you’re not looking at data as part of your channel or distribution strategy and you’re doing well, you’re either really lucky or you won’t be doing well for long!” Janes quipped. “You have to look at the data. You have to monitor how things are performing.”

There are lots of metrics to look at, Janes said, including “average view percentage—that tracks how far into the video on average users got before they dropped off. if you have a high AVP, it shows that you’ve done a great job making a video that people stick around for. If you’ve got something where people are dropping off in the 15 to 20 percent range, you have to ask yourself, what’s happening at that point in the video? It allows creators to make informed decisions about their creative. We’re also looking at average views per viewer, which tells us how many times each viewer is coming back to watch a video again. If we see a video that’s performing well on YouTube with repeat customers, that gives us pretty strong reason to believe that if that video appears on another platform somewhere else, the kid audience is going to connect with that video and watch it again even if it’s not on YouTube.”