The Manhattan-based video news company NowThis makes content that is optimized for social media. A recent NowThis video featuring New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s views on campaign finance laws got more than 21 million views in one day and a video of Beto O’Rourke’s stance on NFL players kneeling during the National Anthem has been viewed 50 million times and shared more than 1 million times on Facebook alone.
Kenneth Lerer and Eric Hippeau, the founders of the venture capital firm Lerer Hippeau, started NowThis in 2012 with a $5 million Series A from their firm. The 116-person team publishes dozens of videos a day across verticals including news, politics, food, sports, entertainment and money. Like the Ocasio-Cortez and O’Rourke videos, many get viewed and shared millions of times. The team says that NowThis reaches more than 115 million people and has 2.5 billion video views a month, making it one of the most-watched video news platforms on social media.
Tina Exarhos, the chief content officer, excitedly gives a tour of their floor at the Group Nine Media headquarters in Soho. Group Nine Media, a digital-first media holding company started by Ben Lerer in 2016, owns NowThis, The Dodo, Seeker, Thrillist and a branded content studio. NowThis is building a control room, green room and three new studios for the growing production team. Exarhos stops to point out a team member who is translating all the videos to Mandarin and one who dives through the analytics to determine the best times to post on each social media platform.
Given the speed at which NowThis is able to produce videos, NowThis is frequently one of the first publications to cover breaking news stories and distribute them to their millions of social media followers. The main NowThis page has 14.3 million followers on Facebook, 2.2 million on Twitter and 1.4 million on Instagram and many verticals have dedicated social media pages. Although the team analyzes metrics including video views, comments and shares to ensure that their content resonates with the audience, she doesn’t measure the company’s success or base the content strategy on the metrics alone. “You can't rely on the viral hit for your business strategy,” says Exarhos. Her goal is to have a large number of videos that do well every single day and content people can rely on like serialized shows.
When Exarhos arrived at NowThis from her role as chief marketing officer at MTV in 2016, her goal was to help make the brand more well-known and she remembers telling her boss that the only way to do that was to create original content in addition to covering the daily news cycle. In January, NowThis launched a new division called NowThis Originals. The News Group produces daily news stories for social media distribution and NowThis Originals focuses on developing and producing new and original shows that are optimized for distribution on social media, streaming and linear television platforms. The hope is that their new series will create new audiences and more revenue for the company through product integration and ads as well as having corporate sponsors for series. For example, the pharmaceutical company Bayer is the sponsor for “Global Game Changers,” a NowThis series that features a different scientist during each episode.
NowThis earns most of its revenue from sponsored content, advertising and content distribution, but the team wouldn’t disclose their exact revenue or if the company is profitable. NowThis also makes money when clients buy advertising packages across all of the Group Nine Media properties. Together, Group Nine Media properties garner more than 5 billion monthly video views and reach over 80% of U.S. adults in their 20s, the team says, adding that audiences spend nearly 3 billion minutes a month watching their content.
The allure for advertisers isn’t just the amount of reach they are likely to get, according to Exarhos. “Anybody can go buy audience," says Exarhos, “But you can't buy the connection to the audience that we've created and there's a really deep brand trust.” Exarhos thinks NowThis was able to build trust by focusing on social impact, specifically, issues that matter most to millennials, such as immigration, gun violence and climate change. “There are a small handful that we are covering really intensely every single day, not just in that short form, but now in that longer form original space,” says Exarhos, “That social impact is a huge part of our brand.”
Another core tenant of the brand’s mission is to diversify. “Ubiquity is the new exclusivity. It used to be that you only wanted to be on the one place that got you the most money. If that's your strategy now, you're done,” Exarhos says, “You want to be everywhere, and you want to be everywhere in the smartest way.”
