Until last year, video was a largely untapped revenue opportunity for Advance Local, a media group that operates local news sites.
It has largely been “put on the back burner,” says Grant Whitmore, vice president of ad tech and programmatic revenue.
Although the affiliated sites, including Syracuse.com, MassLive.com, OregonLive.com and NJ.com, produced some videos to supplement their editorial content, they did not create or monetize them on a large scale.
Advance Local also didn’t have a dedicated online video platform partner. Instead, the company’s websites published a handful of video content on their YouTube pages and then manually embed the YouTube player into specific articles.
Then came 2023. It was a rough year for digital media, with a decline in traffic to online publishers across the board.
“It was a rocky time for many publishers and we were looking for ways to diversify our revenue portfolio,” Whitmore said. “Video was at the top.”
An LLM-based approach
At the end of last year, Advance Local chose EX.CO after meeting with several potential online video platform partners.
EX.CO has a contextual video recommendation system that analyzes the text of an article page and automatically suggests related video content. It took a fairly traditional approach to contextual recommendations, said Tom Pachys, CEO and co-founder of EX.CO.
“We used the text linked to an article and the text from the video to do what’s called ‘vectorization’ and find the closest match,” said Pachys. This process converts words into numerical or mathematical representations of their semantic meaning so that an algorithm can understand them.
This week, EX.CO released an updated version of its video recommendation engine that also uses LLaMA, Meta’s large language model, to determine the similarities between articles and available video content. The model also takes into account sentiment, keywords, video length, title, recency, and media category.
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This approach is faster but also results in higher quality and more relevant recommendations, Pachys said, because the system learns what gets the best engagement and the editorial team can set rules and guidelines.
For example, a publisher could tell the algorithm not to serve a video if the match is below a certain relevance threshold, or not to include an ad in a video about a sensitive topic.
Easy money
EX.CO’s engine ingests all of a publisher’s video content, indexes it semantically, including from social channels, and automatically pulls videos from a syndicated library of licensed third-party content when no relevant video exists in the archive.
“We need tools that are as easy as possible for newsrooms to use, because it would be impractical for us to have staff in all of our markets frantically and manually selecting videos that match each of our stories,” Whitmore said.
But just as important, says Whitmore, are the monetization opportunities. More video inventory means the opportunity for more pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll advertising.
Video now accounts for a “significant” percentage of Advance Local’s total programmatic revenue, he added, which will no longer be the case in 2023.
“Back then, video revenue came from the pennies that YouTube was throwing at us, so programmatic video revenue went from zero to seven figures literally overnight,” Whitmore said. “And we were able to do this without a significant cost investment, other than the hours it took the developers and product people to make it happen.”
Don’t hate the player
However, not all visitors are shown videos.
While advertising revenue is important, Advance Local places great emphasis on the user experience on its websites.
For example, Advance Local initially did not provide video to subscribers.
“We’ve taken it slow,” Whitmore said. “We’ve been cautious because these people are paying to access our content, but overall we’ve seen high user adoption of video across all of our sites.”
The player appears below the second paragraph of the article text. Videos play automatically, are muted by default, can be easily closed, and moved to the side within a floating player when a user scrolls away. This classifies it as “companion content” according to the IAB Tech Lab’s video ad format guidelines published last year.
When a page has a video, Whitmore says, visitors spend more time with the content and are more likely to read additional articles during their session.
Advance Local sites have also seen a decline in what EX.CO calls the negative engagement rate, which is an indication that a user did not want the video experience on offer. For example, if someone exits a video player very quickly, it may be because the person did not expect the autoplay with the sound on, or because the player itself obscured the item.
According to EX.CO, overall negative interactions decrease by about 40% after publishers implement the new LLM-powered video recommendation engine.
“This is the kind of thing that gives us the confidence to move forward with video,” Whitmore said. “It’s been a big initiative for us this year and will remain one of our major initiatives in 2025.”
