Launched five years ago, melty had one simple idea: “to create media that only talks to young people and embraces and utilises in-house technology to help identify, track and deliver topical content to that audience. Content and text are at the core of our offer, but again, video is key.”

Clamart said melty deploys a simple formula to connect to its young audience:

1. Right time, right topic:  To do that, the newsroom is “wired” with an in-house culture and design featuring video screens displaying the topics for the editorial team to track and a real-time enhanced editorial message based on their likes.
2. Write with a young flavour: There are 16 editorial teams, 100 writers (about 27 years old on average) producing 300-500 articles daily, and, again, a clearly positive editorial message. They also produce about 28 exclusive reports each week with celebrity interviews, discoveries, etc.
3. Follow the young on their multiscreen lifestyles: That means on mobile, social media, desktop. melty tracks its audience throughout the day. And they are increasingly building their video presence for good reason: there are 3.3 million views per month on video and 60 per cent of the visitors view the entire video. The videos are produced by an in-house production team, and there are 15 YouTube channels. Then, of course, is social media: with 900,000 fans on Twitter, Facebook and Google+, and 200,000 shares and likes on social networks each month.
4. Innovate, innovate, innovate: The company is comprised of nine hubs with complementary functions: there’s melt media, melty prod (in-house video production for video creation, productiona and broadcasting), melty live event (event creation, bridging real events with its audience, covering, broadcasting and live streaming), melty social, melty entertainment (for star endorsement), melty storm (creative hub for strategic planning, copy writing, editing, graphic design, etc.), melty advertising (producing classified advertising, native, mobile formats, video, sponsorship and sweepstakes), melty lab and at the core, melty group.

Video best cases and native advertising

“Native advertising is very important to us in terms of combining user engagement and advertising and hopefully resulting in potential revenues,” Clamart said.

He presented a number of native advertising examples whereby a full editorial platform is developed by the editorial team featuring daily updates and video interviews. In one case, with Coca-Cola. The result:

• 250 pieces of “hot” content published each month
• Renowned columnists contributing
• Driving 200,000 visits each month
• Average of 4 minutes spent per visit.
• After visiting three times, visitors say they would recommend the brand 17 percent more than before.

Snow House 2, with Bouygues Telecom

This featured a branded web-series with eight episodes created, produced and broadcasted by melty. It resulted in:

• 5 pages viewed per per visit
• On average 16 minutes time spent on the dedicated “content corner”.

Paying off

After five years, the company is profitable, Clamort said, bringing in €4.5 million turnover in 2013. That turnover is based purely on advertising, he said, and 30 percent of that came from native advertising and that is expected to increase to 50 percent this year.

Half of its staff are paid, and it uses a number of interns and regional and local freelancers, he said.