How Quartz went from zero to 200 million video views

Lucinda Southern of Digiday writes about how Quartz went from zero video views to 200 million video views in 10 months.

Southern writes, “For 10 months, Quartz’s three-person video-only team has been experimenting with what works on video. It has nearly reached 200 million views across platforms, according to Delaney (four months ago, Digiday reported Quartz met the 45 million view goal).

“Publishers like the Financial Times are finding success with Facebook video by playing both to the short video clips and the longer, documentary-style videos. Quartz still applies the Quartz curve (optimizing for content that is either short or long, but not in the middle), but the yardstick is different. ‘It’s not the length of video but the amount of work that goes into it,’ counters Delaney.

“‘Everyone seems to be interested in Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau,‘ he said, referring to a very short, quick, sharable, low-intensity piece of video of the politician talking about diversity that has gained close to 6 million views since it was published in January. The other end of the scale is a video which has had more time spent on it, perhaps more animations and charts, or its most successful video to date on discovering deep-sea creatures, which has nearly 24 million views and is still only a minute and a half long but took more reporting.”

Read more here.