Wibbitz’s in-house editorial team creates daily Top Story news videos using our text-to-video Control Room platform. In his guest post, Wibbitz Editor Bradley reveals how to create the most impactful videos for your top-trending articles.
Twenty percent may not seem like a whole lot, but thanks to the way that audiences are now consuming news, that’s the amount of articles that a majority of your traffic is coming from. It’s all part of the 80/20 rule that our VP of Sales Ido coined, and that our publishers are beginning to embrace. It states that, on average, 80% of a publisher’s website traffic is generated from 20% of its pages.
Like Ido explained in his article on Digiday, we have a unique algorithm in place within our platform that scans a publisher’s articles, and gives each a URL velocity score based on pageviews, how many hours it’s been live, traffic sources and bounce rate. As a service to premium publishers, the Wibbitz editorial team (including myself) will spend a month tracking and creating videos for articles with scores that fall into the top 20%. With the help of Wibbitz Editorial Services, many of our publishing partners have seen their engagement and revenue numbers increase tenfold.
Creating videos that you intend to publish on your highest-traffic pages requires a special touch. Since these are videos you know your audience will see, they have a different purpose than videos meant to drive users to the page— they’re already there, so now, you want to keep them there. These are the four things that I keep in mind when creating videos for publishers’ top trending articles, in order to make the biggest impact:
1. Put your best media footage forward
The timeliness and quality of media can make or break your video — this is visual storytelling after all. A majority of trending stories are breaking news stories, and need to have a supporting video created in an expedited manner. Find the right image or video clip that will generate the emotion you are looking for, and features the actual person(s), locations, or events that your article is about. Maybe it’s a sports highlight, or an acceptance speech at an award show. Here’s a video that I created for The Inquisitr that features up-to-date, top-quality media from the Wibbitz library and the one and only Beyonce’s Instagram:
2. Summarize your story with text overlays
Your brand’s voice and certain authors have an unmistakable written style (especially those that are generating the most traffic) — so showcase it in your video. Text overlays are a great way to pull out and highlight the most interesting and important parts of your article, so readers have a short, visually engaging way to skim the story, even if they don’t have time to read it. So make sure to keep it that way… short. The perfect length for a caption video is between 30-45 seconds.
3. Pick a catchy tune
Like media, the soundtrack you choose to accompany your video can have a big impact on whether your viewer watches all the way through. The Control Room contains over 100 soundtracks organized by tone and mood — whichever soundtrack you decide to go with, it should match the subject of the video. Hook your viewers with a sound that will resonate with them and keep them watching all the way through. In the following video created for National Review, I chose a dramatic soundtrack to go along with the sobering topic of climate change:
4. Publish above-the-fold, set to scroll-to-play
Now that your videos were given the special touch, make sure everyone will get to see them! Videos should be above-the-fold of your top trending article pages (and of every page with a video, for that matter) and should play as soon as they’re seen on the page. This way, you can ensure viewability — and in turn, that your videos will make as much of an impact as possible in terms of both engagement and revenue.
