Aligning Video With Content to Increase Engagement

By embedding videos next to related articles, publishers are able to increase page views and time spent for both mediums.

By Chandra Johnson-Greene
Monday, June 1, 2009

For the past few years, online video has been a reliable source for increasing traffic and engagement on Web sites, but it has traditionally been housed separately from other content. Now publishers are finding that if they place video next to related content, they can increase both page and video views.

“The more you align video with content, the better it does,” says Scott Mebus, executive producer of Hearst Digital Media’s video department. “It’s a great way to engage our audience and give them a 360-degree experience.”

According to Mebus, Hearst recently began embedding related videos into its articles on the right rail of each page. One of its most recent videos, which featured actress Megan Fox during her cover shoot for Esquire, received one million views in the first four days of its launch. Mebus attributes the video’s success to the subject, of course, but also because there was a real story behind the shoot.

“A lot of lessons for video are the same as competing on the Web in general,” he says. “When you get away from the content and the idea that people are looking for something specific, that’s when you get into trouble. You can go anywhere and see videos of celebrities, but they’re not unique. We had a real story to share and we weren’t just throwing it out there. There’s something about video in that when you hit it right, engagement will be high.”

Renee Jordan, general manager, TasteofHome.com, says that her team has also found a connection between content and video. TasteofHome.com currently has over 1,000 videos on their site via its relationship with Magnify.net, which allows its clients to curate videos from all over the Internet and place them on their Web sites. TasteofHome.com’s page views have increased by 200 percent year-over-year since partnering with Magnify.net last year.

Jordan found that by combining these curated videos with the 35,000 recipes that are on Taste of Home, engagement could be increased. “Content is truly what the game is about,” she told AD. “Video in isolation only has one dimension. It’s about bringing it all together.”

For example, Jordan and her team found and appropriated a playlist of videos around the technique of roasting asparagus. The playlist was linked back to related recipes that Taste of Home already had on their site for roasted asparagus. “It was a way of bringing the outside content we had on our site and combining it with the our existing content,” she says. “It’s been working well for us as far as time spent. On comScore, we rank number five in terms of time spent and video contributes to that.”

Jordan adds that in the future, Taste of Home would like to have videos connected to each and every one of its recipes. “It would be great for us in the future to be able to round out and complete the instructional and learning aspect of our recipes with video,” she says. “Video continues to have great potential to be monetized.”