The Tribune Company Wants To Make 730,000 Videos Per Year

You may have noticed that your news feed is now full of short and sweet two-minute videos. But why is digital video production suddenly so popular, and how can businesses incorporate it into their online marketing campaigns?

Tribune Publishing is an institution, one of the oldest media companies in the country, and as such it’s struggling to adapt to the digital 21st century. The company just changed it’s name to Tronc, for some reason.

To keep up with the Millennial crowd, the Tribune company is now pumping out online videos at an astonishing pace, and it’s still not fast enough.

“Right now we’re doing a couple hundred videos a day,” said Tribune Chairmam Michael W. Ferro in a new report from The New York Times. “We think we need to be doing 2,000 videos a day.”

That’s about 730,000 videos every year, and even spread out among the company’s various media outlets, an insane amount of videos. It’s further confirmation that if you want to stand out online, video production is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal. And it’s not just publishers. Online marketing companies are also pushing clients towards professional video production. Even web designers use video production companies to incorporate videos into their clients’ sites.

The Surprising New Trend in Online Video Production? Automated Videos
So, how do you produce 730,000 videos in a single year?

Short answer: you don’t. Companies like Tribune are now investing in web video production services that offer automated video production, which automatically turn blog posts into videos using stock videos, photos, and web copy.

The result is an incredibly bland web video that looks exactly like the other thousands of videos crowding your news feed. It’s an approach that makes sense for a media giant that needs to achieve economies of scale, but an impractical solution for everyone else. No wonder it’s been such a good year for video production companies.

What Changed? Why Are Digital Videos Suddenly So Successful?
For years, even big league publishers like The New York Times and BuzzFeed struggled to monetize their video content.

Here’s the problem: a blog post, whether it’s a news story or listicle, is cheap to produce. But video production is expensive, time consuming, and extremely difficult. Yet if you’ve spent much time using social media, you must have noticed that videos are everywhere. What changed?

Social media companies discovered that users love to watch short, informative videos. That’s why sites like Facebook, Twitter, Vice, BuzzFeed, and The New York Times are full of short videos, usually from one to three minutes long, which feature a combination of graphics, text on screen, voiceover, and live video.

Here’s a perfect example: How To Make Tiny Donuts, which has racked up 27 million views on Facebook alone.

How Can Businesses Use Video Production in Local Online Marketing?
Today, if you want success in search engine optimization, you need quality content. That’s why SEO and SEM services are also betting big on web video production services. By March 2013, Facebook was driving 21.25% of all the traffic sites received, and videos stand out on Facebook.

Americans also spend an average of two hours using mobile devices every day, and one in four searches comes from a mobile device. And as any online marketing company will tell you, people love to watch videos on mobile devices.

An engaging video can help a company boost their local SEO services, mobile marketing, and social media marketing at the same time. To get started on your own business video, contact our digital video production specialists today.