YouTube news drive ignores facts
ANOTHER week, another handout from the technology sector to the media industry. This time it’s Google, as it so often is, which is supporting the media. Or Google’s YouTube, to be exact. The video platform is going to spend $25m to build ‘a better news experience on YouTube, together.’ Presumably the word ‘together’ was added by some PR whizz to indicate a joint effort between YouTube and publishers, who might be wary of the dreaded pivot to video. So how joint will the effort be?
Well it will involve the creation of a working group with news organisations and experts from around the world. The aim is to help develop new product features and improve the news experience on YouTube. Secondly, YouTube will provide funding in 20 or so markets to help news organisations build sustainable video operations. These grants will help news outlets to train staff, enhance production facilities and develop formats optimised for online video. And thirdly, YouTube will expand its support team. It will have a host of specialists on hand to support partners with training and best practices in formats, audience development, operations, and fancy technical integrations.
But that’s not all. YouTube is also going to promote trustworthy sources of news. The platform is promising to make it easier to find quality news by highlighting videos from news sources in search results. It will also serve short previews of news articles alongside YouTube search results relating to breaking stories in the US. These will link to the full article. And will come with a reminder that breaking news can change rapidly.
Lest YouTube be accused of packaging up a particular version of the truth, it’s also making an effort to help users to make their own judgments about the news they choose to consume.
Users will now be served information from the likes of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica alongside videos about historical events and scientific topics that are often subject to misinformation. The moon landing and the Oklahoma City Bombing are cited as examples. YouTube will also showcase more local news, initially in the US. This is an attempt to help audiences access local news in the living room, YouTube’s fastest growing screen.
Plus a host of popular YouTubers will be rounded up to support MediaWise, a USbased initiative that aims to teach digital literacy skills to teens.
These elements are all on top of YouTube’s player for publishers initiative. This sees Google allow publishers in some markets use its YouTube player to serve and monetise all their video. This reduces hosting and development costs. Mind you, it is only available in 25 countries. So will it work? For YouTube, the answer is almost certainly. Aside from the positive PR, YouTube will get an influx of credible news, allowing it to shift its image from a random user-generated content to a platform which people can rely on for serious information. Whether it will work for publishers is another question.
YouTube has insisted it doesn’t want to directly fund content creation – something that Facebook has done in the past. It wants something more sustainable, which is laudable. But an extra $25m won’t shift the fundamentals of online video.
If you plot the opportunity cost of creating digital videos against the higher CPMs for video and factor in how media buyers purchase online video ads, it’s unclear whether traditional publishers will ever be able to view video as a cash cow.
There are a host of other reasons why publishers may not be jumping for joy. This funding isn’t really new; it’s part of the Google News Initiative which was already announced. Also, $25m is small beans considering YouTube’s financial clout and the declines in news publishers’ revenues.
And YouTube will also have to convince media outlets that it can legitimately gauge publishers’ levels of authoritativeness. Whether publishers want to succumb to a distribution channel ranking them in this way is another matter.
But perhaps the biggest issue is that news website users aren’t big fans of digital video. They seem to prefer text.
A Reuters News Project report from 2016 found 76pc of respondents across 26 countries avoided video on news sites. Why? 41pc felt that reading articles is quicker and more convenient than watching video news. While 19pc stated videos don’t add value to a text story. And there’s the crux; while audiences flock to YouTube for video, they’re not flocking to news websites for it.