Love Island’s YouTube views pass 50m mark, but Nine still struggling with CPM on the platform
Nine has seen its Love Island Australia YouTube channel pass the 50m viewer mark, with UK audiences being a driver of traffic, group content strategy director Lizzie Young told the Mumbrella360 conference.
Despite the network’s online successes on the Google-owned platform, Young pointed out monetising the traffic remains a challenge with YouTube’s low CPMs.
Speaking on a panel discussing social video at Mumbrella360, Young said: “It’s probably not that surprising we do see video as an enormous part of our business and social asset to engage audience and advertisers. In terms of scale and how important is to our business.
“I look at something we’ve done in the past two weeks such as Love Island. We popped up a YouTube channel from scratch on that show and we’ve ticked up over 50m views in that time – which is a pretty significant achievement.
“That being said, we need to come back to the monetisation question because if there’s one thing this industry needs to solve, if we want a healthy ecosystem here, then it’s metrics and monetisation.
“Everything for us has two lenses to it, one is audience reach and the other is monetisation. So there’s no question all of these platforms have to some degree is audience reach, what we’re finding is the most adhesion is from YouTube which is why we’re there.”
Young pointed out that part of Nine’s strategy with Love Island also involved tapping into the UK market for international viewers.
“It does have the additional benefit of being able to monetise,” she said. “For us we can also monetise internationally which is really important, particularly with a show like Love Islan. So here in Australia it’s in its first year but in the UK it’s in its fourth season and the third season went crazy, so we knew if we put Love Island up we would get a portion of audience from the UK and we could monetise that.”
Young also observed how YouTube users behaved in a similar way to 9Now’s audience, with viewers watching entire two-minute segments, as opposed to Facebook views which rarely last more than 22 seconds.
That short timeframe on Facebook poses a challenge for marketers, Young believes, as it’s difficult to get a brand message across in that time frame.
Despite the success for Nine, YouTube’s low returns for content creators needs to be resolved, said Young: “I do think though the CPMs are the issue that needs to be addressed, you can’t put people’s content on the platform and have no responsibility for them to be able to monetise it in an effective way.”
