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 While the companies have long lured audiences through social
media like Facebook Inc, that has made them vulnerable to
changes that could bury their content. TV also offers the
opportunity for revenue from licensing shows domestically and
abroad.
Three-year-old ATTN:, which draws more than half of viewers for
its videos on current events from Facebook, is in development on
two pilots. It has sold a pilot of a documentary-style news show
to CBS Corp's Showtime and is co-producing a series called
"America Versus" with Viacom Inc's new Paramount Network, Matt
Segal, ATTN:'s chief executive, told Reuters.
As digital media becomes more competitive, television is a
crucial next step for companies like BuzzFeed, which announced
layoffs for 100 employees last year amid reports it missed
revenue targets, executives said.
Group Nine and BuzzFeed already have shows on air or scheduled
with networks owned by their respective investors Discovery
Communications and Comcast Corp's NBCUniversal, and are now
pitching pilots to other networks, executives told Reuters.
Facebook recently changed its news feed to favor posts from
friends and family of its more than 2 billion users over content
shared by publishers, underscoring the risk of depending too
much on third-party social media.
"Our weakness is we don't own those platforms and that's just
the reality," said Ben Lerer, CEO of New York-based Group Nine,
which owns travel brand Thrillist, video news creator NowThis
and animal video site The Dodo. "This is a way of gaining
revenue outside of that ecosystem."
Television also offers a much more lucrative advertising market,
executives said, even as viewers increasingly cancel cable
subscriptions in favor of online streaming services like Netflix
Inc.
Spending on TV spots is expected to be $72 billion this year,
compared to $15.4 billion for digital ad spending, according to
market researcher eMarketer.
Los Angeles-based ATTN: always planned to get into TV and
expects to bring in seven figures of ad revenue this year if its
pilots get picked up, said Segal.
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Segal declined to comment on how much ad revenue the company brings
in now, but said it would also earn fees from licensing shows to
partners in the United States and abroad.
"Television is going to bring us more ad revenue and brand lift," he
said.
I WANT MY TV
Vice Media was the first digital media company to get into TV with
its own show on HBO, as well as its own channel, Viceland.
Vice News Tonight brought in on average 174,000 viewers between the
ages of 18-49 in 2017, compared to 130,000 the previous year,
according to Nielsen.
ATTN:'s pilot with Showtime is a documentary-style series that
addresses topics like politics, socioeconomics, and the war on
drugs.
"America Versus," ATTN:'s show it is developing with Paramount
Network, will take topics like binge drinking and look at them in
the United States versus other countries, Segal said.
Group Nine's The Dodo will premier its first TV series, "Dodo
Heroes," featuring people who save animals in need, with Discovery's
Animal Planet this year.
BuzzFeed is shopping a game show to a number of broadcast networks,
which would be the first time it has a show outside of NBC networks,
said Matthew Henick, head of BuzzFeed Motion Pictures. BuzzFeed
recently announced a documentary series with NBC's Oxygen network.
"It used to be with digital you were just hoping to work within an
algorithm where viewers are going to go," Henick said. "Now people
know what to expect if they go to a BuzzFeed News show."
(Reporting By Jessica Toonkel; Editing by Anna Driver and Meredith
Mazzilli)
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