Saturday, January 6, 2024

2 Billion Views and the Fastest Growing Content Genre in the World

Our nature and wildlife life social video brand, Roaring Earth, hit over two billion views on Facebook last year. Latest Sightings, our partner in South Africa, saw over 5 billion views across YouTube, TikTok and FB.  For both of us, it was significant year-over-year growth and is clearly part of a broader trend.

Wildlife and nature content is quickly becoming one of the most popular  programming genres in the world, thriving on every major media platform. The BBC, Netflix, Disney and other premium streamers now spend billions per year on blue chip nature TV series that often bring in some of their highest ratings.

Ad-supported nature channels in the FAST ecosystem now generate nearly 10% of all viewing and represent one of its fastest-growing categories, according to research from Amagi.  “Nature”, a legend of the genre, is entering its 43rd season at PBS and is more popular than ever.

It's the same story on social media. Many of YouTube, Meta and TikTok’s most viewed short-form videos are wildlife clips, with some of the biggest hits featuring the 94-year-old global media icon, David Attenborough. Last year, we had multiple videos deliver over 100 million views each for the first time. Over on Reddit, the cheeky nature brand "Nature is F-ing Lit" is among the platform's fastest-growing subreddit with 12 million subscribers. And while comment threads on social media are notoriously toxic, this content seems to bring out the best in folks with comments that are (mostly) informed, civilized and even inspiring.

Environmental concerns are one of the factors driving the boom. Many of the most charismatic animals featured in the content are endangered and in dire need of protection. Covid also played a role as people around the world flocked outdoors to state and national parks, leading to a deeper appreciation of nature and a desire to learn more.  When they got home, they not only watched more nature content, but downloaded apps like the Merlin Bird ID and All Trails, both now legitimate app store hits with tens of millions of downloads.

Another contributor: the legalization of marajuana.  Nature programming and weed are perfect companions according to various experts.  And we do know Snoop Dogg is a long time fan!

But the biggest factor is the inexhaustible supply of fresh and compelling content. Every day, hundreds of new wildlife encounters are captured by both professional production teams and camera-ready amateurs alike. And the footage they capture often comes made to order with riveting imagery, a powerful narrative arc and cast of characters that would make a Pixar screenwriter jealous. Novelist Ben Dolnick, in a delightful piece in the AWL a while back described how a 2-minute clip from the BBC's ground-breaking Planet Earth 2, “taught him more about storytelling than years of expensive education.”

Adding to the appeal for programmers is that nature content is family-friendly, evergreen and plays to an international audience. (Over 50% of our views came from outside the US)

New technology will only increase the flow of fresh daily content in 2024. More robust satellite internet connectivity is now enabling us to live stream from the most remote wildlife preserves with narrated game drives that will generate hundreds of new hours of both long and short-form content.

Latest Sightings is dedicating more and more resources to their surging wildlife app which enables users to share their sightings with the community and earn licensing revenue from their photo and video content. It's exciting to be part of a growing content genre that is entertaining, educational and inspiring, and most importantly, good for us and the planet. We'll be announcing new programming and distribution partnerships for our growing library of content shortly.

Thursday, December 22, 2022

This Cat Has Something To Say

This rare footage of a Canada lynx climbing onto a logging vehicle generated millions of views, but more importantly, a spirited and (mostly) civil comment thread on the future of our planet's forests. 

What we thought was just a cool clip to share of an elusive and mesmerizing animal ... turned into a kind of community forum, triggering a flood of additional content, as well as ideas for new videos, podcast episodes and articles.

Thousands commented, weighing in with their thoughts on the importance of sustainable forest management policies, while others lamented the catastrophic impact of deforestation. Some saw the operator of the vehicle as a savior of the lynx's habitat, making the forest healthier while also reducing the risk of forest fires and enabling a sustainable supply of timber.  Others saw the Lynx coming face-to-face with an existential threat that is permanently wiping out forests and its wildlife in warmer regions of the planet.

Online commenting has been with us since the earliest days of the Web, representing the best and worst of what the Internet can be.  On one hand, they are a place for thoughtful and enlightened, open-to-all online discourse. On the other hand, they can be a toxic swamp of offensive stupidity and awfulness.  (And many times both within the same thread.) Social media companies have only mainstreamed and hypercharged this dynamic. 

Many prominent publishers like CNN.com have pulled the plug completely, disabling comments on all their content. Others, like the NY Times, have gone back and forth, more recently expanding their commitment to user comments, leveraging artificial intelligence tools and other moderation tactics to help manage the chaos. The WSJ is also giving more support to their commenting sections.


The benefits seems to outweigh the downsides.  When managed properly, a robust commenting platform fosters community, brand loyalty, greater time on site and a better understanding of the audience. It gives the content an afterlife, and if moderated properly, the audience much needed exposure to differing viewpoints.


Moderation is key.  We keep a close eye on all our comment threads, removing bad players and spam immediately, and sometimes guiding the conversation when it starts to steer off the rails.

Tuesday, January 4, 2022

Fitbit For Your Media Diet

Recently I have been awakening to the sound of trumpets and chimes from my wife’s Duolingo app.  Learning Spanish amidst toyful prompts seems like a much better way to start the day than scrolling Twitter, which had been her wake-up habit of late. If you had to compare it to breakfast, think orange juice and oatmeal versus Coca-Cola and Cocoa Puffs. 

For years now it’s been hammered into us how terrible junk food is for our mind and body, and finally, we are putting our media consumption into more tangible health and wellness terms. 

University of Arkansas Public Health Professor Brian Primack leverages the food analogy in his book “You are What you Click.”  “There was quite a while when people were just eating whatever came out—if TV dinners became a big deal, they would just eat the TV dinners. And if fast food became more available, they would just eat more fast food,” he said in a recent WSJ interview. "It's very easy to over indulge, and a lot of foods are designed to be addictive  - just like a lot of social media sites are designed to bring you back for more, and keep you there as long as possible.

It took years and relentless focus from all corners of society to put in place the government regulations, public information and education that has led to a better understanding of food nutrition, and, although we still have a long way to go, better eating habits.


It’s early innings, but social media is finally under the same degree of focus.  Bipartisan regulation seems likely, important research is finding a mainstream audience, and habits are beginning to change.  


Enriching apps like Duolingo are surging, delighting their fast growing user base and rapidly turning them into paid subscribers, while Twitter failed to add any new users in the US during its last reporting period and is predicted to start losing US users in 2022 and beyond.


And other companies big and small are addressing the idea of "digital nutrition " head on. Apple has been emphasizing and enhancing its “Screen Time” feature -  it’s now one of the first buttons users see in their iPhone Settings and has a component that enables setting time limits on apps.  


Readocracy, an inspired startup, refers to itself as "Fitbit for your information diet" and has gained the support of A-list investors who are focused on building a healthier internet.  Whereas Apple's Screen Time shows you quantity of time, Readocracy allows you to see more of the quality: deep insights about the actual information you were filling your mind with during that screen time. One of their data sets even measures the impact media consumption is having on our mood.


There’s no doubt when we eat healthier we feel better and are in a better state of mind,  and the same goes when we consume healthier media content.  


As the founder of Readocracy puts it: “Information can be precious, or it can be poison. It’s not how much we consume, it’s what we consume and how mindful we are about it.



Thursday, June 18, 2020

Your Next Good Idea

In a recent interview, Sarah Cooper described how she came up with the idea for her wildly popular Trump impersonation videos. Her 11 year old nephew had introduced her to TikTok a while back and it struck her as an “amazing tool for creating new visual interpretations of existing audio.” But nothing much came of it until this year when Trump’s COVID press conferences proved to be the perfect use case. What resulted is a reimagining of comedy itself, drawing accolades from Jerry Seinfeld and Ben Stiller among other comedy legends.



As Steven Johnson, the author of “Where Good Ideas Come From,” says, “We take the ideas we've inherited or stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape.”


I have had 3 startups that were reasonably good enough ideas to bring to market and 5 others that weren’t. The 3 that launched were all based on something I had seen before, but now in a different light through the filter of emerging technologies and trends.  


One, from the early days of the Internet, circa 1999, was for an online music school. A year earlier while working at Time Warner Cable, I had seen a pitch for a new cable network focused on music education. It was too niche for cable, but nothing was too niche for the Web. We sold the company during an overhyped moment, but it ended up, like many Web 1.0 businesses, dying. It was too early for broad user adoption.


My latest idea is a new take on wildlife programming using live cams, camera traps, and user submissions to create a new experiential platform. This one may be too late.


It’s great to talk about where and how good ideas emerge, but at the end of the day, luck and timing are the two biggest factors. And they are completely out of our control.  


So you need to always be tinkering and brainstorming, hoping that when you think a new idea is ready, so does the world.


Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Walt Disney's 1957 Strategy and Cross Promotion Chart





Although I have been an entrepreneur for most of my career, some of the most fun I have had has been my handful of stints at large legacy media companies, where I was brought in to develop new businesses leveraging the company's existing assets.

At Time Warner, in the early aughts, we created an online automotive buying service called BeepBeep.com  Warner Bros owned the trademark as part of it's Road Runner franchise.  Time Warner Cable had thousands of car dealers as local advertising clients in their various markets as well as millions of local ad avails on the cable networks they carried in those markets.  We had the car dealers list their inventory on the new site and then promoted it to car shoppers via the TV ad avails.  In a matter of months we had one of the larger online car shopping sites.

Earlier, in the 90s, we used some of the same tactics to launch NY1 and quickly make it a major new media brand. It didn't hurt that we could launch on Channel 1 across the market.

The stodgy old media companies often have valuable untapped assets and synergies waiting to be mined and brought to life.

But one legacy media company has been working it all the time. The chart up top was created by Walt Disney himself in 1957.  It is one of the greatest examples of company synergy in history, and it has embodied Disney's approach to everything they do since.

These days they are getting ready to launch their new streaming service and the amount of promotion they are providing across their own media assets is startling.  As reported in The NY Times, anchors and hosts at Disney's network and local TV properties are chatting it up every day and buses in their them parks are wrapped with ads for the service. Tinker Bell's 9 million FB fans are also seeing messages.

Every creek and crevice of The Magic Kingdom is in on the game.

Monday, November 19, 2018

Two Video Companies Are Eating Up The Internet

Netflix and YouTube are the two most powerful video content platforms in the world, marrying great tech with great content and dictating the future of television and all form of digital video content.  They both seem to get stronger by the day and, as recently reported, are literally eating up the Internet, together responsible for 25% of global Internet traffic.

They are each the leaders and role models for the two ways we will consume all our video content shortly: one subscription based, the viewing passive, on bigger screens and featuring longer form programming; the other ad supported, viewed actively (clicking, swiping, sharing) on smaller screens featuring shorter form programming.

We'll probably spend an equal amount of our aggregate video viewing time with each model, but we can see a bit more clearly what the longer form models will look like - it's the same TV and film formats we've always had, just unlimited choices.  The short form is much less defined, as the technology and user base is younger and open to experiencing (and influencing) new video formats.

Netflix and YouTube's success is driving a frenzied reaction from fellow digital behemoths and the largest traditional media companies.  Disney's acquisition of Fox and AT&T's acquisition of Time Warner were triggered in large part by Netflix's growing strength, and Facebook's deep dives into video with Watch and IGTV is an attempt to compete with YouTube.  And Jeffery Katzenberg has raised over $1 billion from some of the biggest and most influential players in the entertainment industry to launch a new service that brings TV-level production budgets to short form, mobile viewed content.

It's the short form we here at Roaring Earth are focused on.  Our goal is to thrill and enlighten like the BBC does time and time again with their long form nature docs, most of which can be found on Netflix.  They are the incomparable masters of long form nature and wildlife content and Planet Earth 2, from a few years back, is among the most successful television series of all time. 

But there is a huge opportunity to create similar content specifically for mobile devices.  We have delivered over 250 million video views to our site's video library, while developing and fine-tuning a new format we call "mini-docs." They are 1-3 minutes in length featuring extraordinary stories from our natural world that can be watched on the go, with quick loading play lists for folks that want to binge for a few minutes.  This one just hit the 3 million view mark a few weeks after launch:


It is a golden age for short form and long form content.