Cheddar’s Steinberg talks snackable content, building brand

Jon Steinberg, the CEO and founder of business news network Cheddar, talked to VideoInk about Cheddar’s success.

Here is an excerpt:

Between your clip-based / snackable content like “Pet Chatz lets you call your pets” and “This is a giant trash vacuum” versus typical news-network, or bloomberg, style segments like “Advertising’s facelift discussion with Diply” what’s Cheddar aiming to be? 

The New York Times has a Business section but also sections on Food, Cars, and Weddings. NBC has NBC News but also sitcoms and reality programming. I think of snackable content as our “gadgets section.” People who watch Cheddar want to see an interview with Chief Product Officer of Youtube, hear our exclusive scoop on a new Snapchat product, as well as short videos highlighting amazing gadgets and technologies.

And of those differing styles of videos, what’s driving the most viewership? 

We have massive low engagement viewership on platforms like Facebook – hundreds of millions of monthly views – that serve as marketing for the highly engaged paid viewership on platforms like Sling.  Our average watch time on Pluto is 30+ minutes, I always new Facebook would move on from news content, so we always focused on using it to build our brand and then get Cheddar into the skinny bundles where we could build and amazing business for ourselves and our MVPD and vMVPD partners.