His team is responsible for producing a wide variety of online videos, ranging from lifestyle to commercial content, which are distributed across the SPH Video Network as well as social media.
In this interview, Ng tells us how his team works, what their most popular content is and how they distribute it on social media. He will also be speaking on these topics and more at WAN-IFRA’s upcoming International Newsroom Summit in London (21-23 November).
WAN-IFRA: In general, how is SPH working with video? How many people do you have on your team working primarily with video, and how many videos are you producing on average each day?
Jonathan Ng: RazorTV was launched in 2008 with a team of 32. It was a large team then, as we were running 8 hours of live stream every weekday. We had two main teams operating from 14:00 to 22:00, one for the live webcast and the other for the field reporting to insert videos into the live discussion.
We ran the live discussion for about six months before switching to video-on-demand as we were getting much more traction on the VOD content.
Currently, SPH English language newsrooms put out about 15-25 clips every day, ranging from local news, to syndicated content to user-generated videos.
How many views are you getting on video, and how has this grown during the past year or so?
Video views have been growing steadily over the past year, with newsrooms producing higher quality and timely videos.
What are the most popular subjects for videos?
Human interest, courts and crime and some user-generated videos have always fared well with our audience.
Is SPH monetizing video? If so, how are you doing this?
At a basic level, SPH are selling pre-roll advertising on our video inventory across all newsrooms. We are also having great success in selling content-marketing videos. It’s a much tougher sell, but these videos add tremendous value for our clients as content-led pieces naturally do well in an editorial environment.
Which social media platforms are you also distributing your video on?
We are engaging our audience across numerous social media platforms: Facebook, YouTube, Whatsapp and Snapchat, just to name a few.