DMG boss Caccappolo: ‘Control’ is key as Mail invests in long-form video
The Future of Media London 2024
The DMG Media vice-president explains why MailOnline has belatedly begun to embrace long-form video on YouTube and speaks about why direct traffic has become increasingly rare — and valuable.
“Over the years, we realised there are a lot of users that are never going to come to publisher websites.”
Rich Caccappolo, then-CEO and now vice-chairman of DMG Media, told a packed crowd at The Future of Media London last week that, while the Mail‘s digital strategy has always been to focus primarily on driving direct traffic, over time the publisher has leant into new formats on social platforms — particularly with video production — to reach broader audiences.
“We’ve realised that the users are going to be on those other platforms and if you want to be important and big, you’ve gotta go where they are,” said Caccappolo. “The result is that we’ve never had more readers, more users, more listeners than now. We’ve never been in front of more people. It’s just a different model.”
The Mail is the largest publisher on TikTok and has over the years also leaned into other social video apps like Snapchat.
He revealed, however, that the Mail‘s direct business is still robust, telling Media Leader editor-in-chief Omar Oakes that “a little under half” of its business comes direct, and that between two-thirds and three-quarters of page views come direct.
“That is a much more safe, predictable place to be,” said Caccappolo. But, he noted, direct traffic is currently “harder than it’s ever been” to acquire.
Key word: ‘Control’
Speaking days before he was named vice-chairman of DMG Media following a broader operational shakeup that saw MailOnline editor and publisher Danny Groom step into the role of DMG Media CEO, Caccappolo declared “control” is a “big word for us” insofar as “direct traffic is a means of control. Direct sales is about control.”
While he agreed that publishers have become too reliant on referral traffic from unreliable sources such as social media and search, he stated he was optimistic about the future of publishing given recent regulatory concerns around Big Tech and social media.
Caccappolo argued that pressure courts in the US and Europe are putting on Big Tech is an “opportunity” for publishers, and similarly the move away from cookies is “going to be great for publishers with real audiences, engaged audiences.”
Caccappolo’s contemporaries have expressed greater concern about the sustainability of news publishing’s business model. Jim Mullen, the CEO of the UK’s largest publisher Reach, last month said rival newsbrands like The Sun and Mail have become “allies as we are fighting an existential battle for survival because of the competition from the likes of Google and Meta.”
Reach CEO: Sun and Mail are our allies in ‘battle for survival’
Caccappolo noted that publishers have to walk a fine line between wanting to retain a high degree of control over their own business model and online traffic intake, and needing to diversify revenue streams by creating commercialisable content on other platforms apart from their own homepages.
“The challenge is how we’re gonna get compensated,” he said. “Whether it’s traffic back or it’s a licensing fee or a revenue share.”
Long-form follows short-form video investment
To that end, Caccappolo explained why the Mail has begun investing more heavily into long-form video content production on YouTube.
“Truth is, we’re a little bit late to long-form video,” he admitted.
While MailOnline has produced and procured videos for years, much of the recent focus on video development has been in creating short-form content for the likes of TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat.
“But the thing we were late to is YouTube,” Caccappolo explained. “YouTube, we realised, is an important way people are spending their time and getting their news.”
He added that he believes Youtube “is going to be a place where a lot of revenue is generated” for the Mail, be it through monetising video views or through partnering with brands to produce sponsored video content.
This summer, the Mail unveiled a new global video strategy, with more than 20 original shows in development rolling out across YouTube and on social media platforms over the course of the next year. The shows are typically split into episodes of between 15 and 22 minutes in length, and cover a variety of subjects.
In tandem, a new commercial offering dubbed “Global Video Studio” has been developed to give advertising partners access to the Mail‘s studio team via its sales staff to develop in-house integrations with the Mail‘s video content.
“It’s a way of taking our storytelling and doing it in a format some people like,” said Caccappolo. “It’s a giant audience and it’s a very big pot of revenue.”
He added that the yields are “great” and that long-form video is brand safe and “good for audience development.”
When asked whether the Mail would ever consider licensing its own original reporting to other entertainment companies to create documentaries, Caccappolo said they “do field those inquires” but that they are “not something we’re budgeting for.”
“My understanding is that’s a ‘hit’ business. It’s not something as predictable as we tend to like to be,” he added.
‘We will never be a hard paywall or a metered paywall’
Important to Caccappolo is not just predictability of revenue generation, but diversity of revenue generation. Apart from viewing YouTube and other social platforms as potential revenue streams going forward, subscription has also become a part of the Mail‘s revenue drivers.
At the start of the year, MailOnline relaunched its Mail+ subscription feature, which puts a subset of articles on the website behind a paywall.
Caccappolo praised the model as a “thread-the-needle play” that seeks to maintain audience scale while also “build[ing] the relationship with some of our more engaged and dedicated users”. He added that Mail+ will be developed such that it will not just deliver unique content but also be “part of a broader membership over time”.
However, he said the Mail is committed to remaining largely free to access.
“We will never be a hard paywall or a metered paywall,” Caccappolo said.
He added: “It’s changed the way we think about content. It’s changed the way we think about these users. So far so good. We’ve been able to keep the traffic on the free [site] going.”
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