NewsBeat

February 2016 NewsBeat 7 Of the users who view Reuters TV on The Globe and Mail's site, 20 to 25 percent of them watch the entire five-minute program, according to Young. "We expect to see higher than that on mobile," she said. (The Globe and Mail audience's use of adblockers is not particularly high, she noted.) The Globe and Mail — and other Reuters TV for Publishers users — have to go back to Reuters to ask for analytics, though "their turnaround is quick." In general, experimenting with products like this is a great way for a publication to "test out content theories," Young said. "We could produce a similar thing, but Reuters has done the format very well." Down the line, if The Globe and Mail were to decide to produce its own short news segments — say, with a Canadian emphasis — "we would work with Reuters to look at the product they're producing and, maybe, figure out some ways that we could license it." Reuters has put a lot of work into the technology behind Reuters TV. Each time that Reuters decides to do a news story as a video, it produces three lengths of that story — "small, medium, and large." The app's algorithms choose the right video length to deliver to each user based on the amount of time the user wants to watch for and that user's past preferences. The algorithm also accounts for users' locations and interests and the judgment of editors. An internal tool lets Reuters analyze each video's performance to see how it resonates with a small sample group of users before it's pushed out to a larger group. The 15-minute program has been the most popular option on Reuters TV's various apps so far, Showman said, because that's the default. World news is the most popular coverage category. So far, Reuters' new strategy appears to be paying off. Active users tripled between the third and fourth quarters of 2015, though Reuters wouldn't give me an actual user number. "The technology that goes into this is state-of- the-art stuff," Showman said. "We believe other news organizations shouldn't just leave other platform builders to build, but should be at the forefront of this." — Reprinted from Neiman Lab

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