Quartz racks up 45 million video views in six months

Lucia Moses of Digiday writes about business news site Quartz and its video strategy.

Moses writes, “Six months ago, Quartz hired a three-person video team and began publishing videos that would live on Facebook and YouTube but not on its own website. The 3-year-old Atlantic Media business news site has embraced experimentation from the get-go, and Facebook made it clear that it was going to favor video content in its news feed. So Quartz wanted to learn about and master natively distributed video, without having to think about business limitations, said Kevin Delaney, Quartz’s editor-in-chief and president.

“‘There were no pre-roll constraints, no advertising, no traffic expectations,’ he said. ‘The idea was to just give them real freedom creatively.’

“In six months, Quartz has racked up 45 million views on 130 videos on Facebook and YouTube. The vast majority of the views are from Facebook, as Quartz’s YouTube channel has garnered 1.6 million total views.

“‘Directionally, it’s a very encouraging number for us, given the number of videos we’ve done with a very small staff,’ Quartz publisher Jay Lauf said.

“Quartz is already one of the stronger business publishers on Facebook, with more than 2 million shares, likes and comments on 2,027 articles posted to Facebook in September, according to social analytics firm Newswhip.”

Read more here.