How Newsy hopes to build a cable-like news network for millennials

With a staff of 60 employees, Newsy produces roughly 1,000 videos per month across categories like U.S. and world news, policy, entertainment, culture and science and technology. Most of these videos run for three minutes or less, and come in the form of typical news reports (they’re either anchored by an in-studio host, produced in the field with a reporter or feature a voiceover with relevant news clips).

The business is entirely ad-supported with most inventory being sold programmatically by a sales team based in New York.

There is data to support the notion that Newsy viewers — a “strong majority” of whom are millennials — are willing to spend more time with its content. According to Sabatinelli, Newsy users average 27 minutes per session on the company’s owned-and-operated platforms, which include a website, mobile app and the aforementioned TV apps. Overall, Newsy averaged 62 million views per month during the third quarter, an increase of 342 percent from the same time period last year. Over-the-top drove that viewership, spiking 638 percent year over year.

At the center of Newsy’s effort in long-form and over-the-top is Newsy Live, a 24-hour streaming channel available online and across its apps. The feed packages all of Newsy’s short-form videos into 30-minute broadcasts. The company updates the feed every hour with the latest videos, breaking news updates and other high-performing videos.

“We know millennials are either not hooking up to the cord or shaving the cord, but there’s still a huge number out there who don’t want to peck for their content, they kind of just want to watch,” said Sabatinelli. “If you want to get a fix of 30 minutes of news that you need to know that day, you’re going to find it here.”

This week, Newsy plans to launch Newsy Live on Pluto TV, an online video service that functions similarly to TV — in that it offers hundreds of always-on channels and a programming guide to tell users what’s airing at that particular time as well as what’s coming up.

Pluto TV is the first of many, as Newsy plans to roll Newsy Live out to additional platforms and distribution partners in the coming weeks and months, said Sabatinelli.

“Every cable operator in America is launching some type of OTT product,” he said, pointing to Dish Network’s Sling TV as an example. “We have the ability to spin-up a linear channel for them.”

While apps and over-the-top distribution are major areas of focus for Newsy, the company isn’t completely ignoring social platforms either. On Facebook, it’s publishing short, text-heavy videos, with an eye toward driving traffic to Newsy.com. On YouTube, the company has eight channels focused on different verticals. And it just arrive on Instagram and is looking at joining Snapchat as well.

“You have to win at social, it’s the greatest megaphone on the planet right now,” said Sabatinelli. But he also pointed to issues social platforms are having with defining views and whether people are actually spending time watching video content on their platforms. “Catching someone’s eye is different from capturing someone’s attention,” he said.

Image via Shutterstock / eldar nurkovic