With 15 billion video views this year, Hearst turns into digital media powerhouse

Hearst Digital’s explorations have led to a presence on almost every distributed platform - from Facebook to Snapchat Discover to Amazon Echo to Musical.ly.

There is a huge change in the old Hearst and the new Hearst. Its new approach is: “We don’t start with, ‘We’re going to make television shows.’ We start with, ‘How can we make video a little bigger part of what we do every day?’”

That encompassed videos of any and every kind. The company’s march into the digital space has the results to flaunt too. Hearst Magazines Digital Media has some solid figures to flaunt: a combined 95 million unique visitors to its sites in October; 15 billion video views in 2017, a 161 per cent year-over-year increase; and 143 million social media followers, a 23 per cent increase over the previous year.

Growth came from other avenues too, not just increasing audiences. Hearst Digital’s revenue and profitability. Hearst Magazines Digital Media has now been profitable for three straight years.

The bedrock of Hearst’s new strategy has been: a centralised news desk, where digital operates separately from the print side of a magazine and writers aren’t tied to a particular title but instead write across titles.

Source : http://www.adweek.com/digital/how-hearst-went-from-legacy-brand-to-digital-media-powerhouse/