Business Insider grows YouTube audience with Facebook videos

Business Insider Business Insider is gaining an audience on YouTube by using the same short social videos that have helped the publisher achieve more than 2.5 billion views across Facebook, reports Sahil Patel of Digiday.

Patel writes, “Business Insider’s three YouTube channels — Business Insider, Tech Insider and Insider — generated 139 million YouTube video views in June, up from 11 million video views in June 2016, according to Tubular Labs. The growth was organic, too, as Business Insider did not pay for subscriber acquisition or views, said Nicholas Carlson, editor-in-chief of Insider, BI’s distributed-media brand.

“Business Insider’s YouTube growth is also not the result of a new content strategy involving the creation of original vlogs, hosted series, animated explainers and other formats known to perform well on YouTube. Instead, Business Insider is putting the same videos on Facebook and YouTube.

“‘A lot of people look at Insider and think, ‘Oh, you’re good at doing Facebook videos because you’ve clearly gamed Facebook,’’ said Carlson. ‘No, what we’re doing is building a type of video that people love to watch on their phones, and that happen to be available on whatever platform they’re using to watch video.'”

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Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.