A Good Story Is No Longer Just Text

Mediahuis is a large international company, so the situation differs across business units. We represent a group of niche and special-interest brands, including Metro (metronieuws.nl, a free website without a paywall) and titles covering automotive, technology, lifestyle and food.

Most of these teams are relatively small. Historically, video was not a major focus because our primary goal was publishing written content for websites and social platforms. Producing video was time-consuming and resource-intensive.

That started to change about six months ago when we began using Flipatic. It allowed us to create short videos from articles in around ten minutes, making video production much more accessible.

For most of our brands, short-form video has become the dominant format. We still produce some longer-form content, particularly for our automotive titles, which publish car reviews on YouTube. But for most of our brands, around 90% of video output is now short-form.

The Flipatic videos are primarily used on our own websites. Our social channels have their own video strategy, built around personalities and different formats, and we sometimes embed those videos in our articles too.

Our goal is simple: we want people to spend more time on our platforms and engage with our journalism in different formats.

Many of our analytics systems were originally designed around long-form video, so measuring the success of shorts required changes. For example, some engagement metrics only triggered after 30 seconds of viewing. That worked when most videos were several minutes long, but many short videos today are 30 seconds to one minute.

As a result, we're often trying to evaluate short-form video with tools designed for a different era.

There is also another challenge: our website audiences tend to be older than the audiences consuming video on TikTok or Instagram. We know from industry research that younger audiences value video highly, but we still lack strong qualitative evidence that our core website audiences actively want short-form video embedded within articles.

As someone who likes data, I'd love to measure that more accurately. We do see time on page increase when an article includes a video, but we'd like to do more qualitative research into how readers perceive articles enhanced with short form video and what needs it actually fills.

Absolutely. The audiences we reach on social media and YouTube are very different from the audiences visiting our websites.

That's one reason we're still trying to understand the role of video on publisher websites, as an addition to a written article. We know people actively seek video on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. What remains less clear is how much value video adds for readers who primarily come to our websites to consume written journalism. Our data shows mixed signals here, which is exactly why we see this as a good case for personalisation. And it's the direction we want to take with Mediahuis anyway. A homepage or an article doesn't have to look the same for everyone. If we know someone values video, we can serve it to them. If we know someone always reads and never engages with video players, we can give them a better experience without it.

Partly. The videos we create with Flipatic are used almost exclusively on our websites. Social media content is produced separately, with a different tone of voice and aesthetic, but we do sometimes embed those social videos in articles as well.

On our websites, video is usually attached directly to an article rather than published as standalone content.