How Business Insider got to 1.5 billion video views per month

Brian Morrissey of Digiday interviewed Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson on how it has achieved 1.,5 billion video views in a month.

Morrissey writes, “For the first three-plus months of its existence, Insider had a general-interest news focus. It used that time to experiment and find out what works and what doesn’t. Beautiful imagery works, but political news did not. In December of 2015, Carlson and his team put the 81 videos it created to that point into categories. Unsurprisingly in retrospect, it found videos like this one about Thai-rolled ice cream did very well.

“‘We saw stories about people trying new foods, quitting their jobs and traveling the world, or people who see something wrong in the world and fight for what’s right,’ Carlson said. ‘This cohered to an idea of people who seize life rather than letting it happen to them.’

“Carlson does not consider Insider a Facebook video shop, even though 90 percent of its video views come from Facebook. Instead, he sees Insider as focused on mobile video and, right now, Facebook is dominating that market but other platforms are trying to make a dent. As to autoplay, about one-third of Insider’s video views are for 30 seconds or longer.”

Read more here.