Can print publishers hold their own in the unfamiliar world of
high-quality TV? Hearst, one of the publishers that have signed on to
YouTube’s quality content push, will soon provide some answers with its
two forthcoming YouTube channels.
On April 15 Hearst is set to launch the Hello Style channel, a collaboration of five of its women’s titles including Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and Harper’s Bazaar. It'll be followed May 1 by the Car and Driver TV channel, from Hearst’s auto-focused brands.
YouTube, which is spending $100 million to help a variety of media
companies develop the channels, is gambling that the higher-quality
content will help it attract advertisers who would have avoided the
amateur content the site is best known for. Magazine publishers, for
their part, are looking to video and other platforms to offset slower
print advertising growth.
“Video is going to become an increasingly important medium,” said John
Loughlin, evp and general manager of Hearst Magazines. “Our goal is not
to become flat-footed in this space.”
But producing high-quality shows with a plot is a leap for most
magazines, whose videos to date have largely consisted of how-to’s and
behind-the-scenes with celebrities. Loughlin revealed that YouTube gave
Hearst $10 million to kickstart production, and like other content
partners, Hearst will provide promotion for the channels. Still, there’s
been a learning curve.
“A lot of this is TV quality, but certainly, the budgets and the time
are not TV,” said Kimberly Lau, vp of business development for Hearst
Digital Media and one of the executives behind the channels initiative.
While YouTube provided funding, it was up to the content partners to
figure out how to program the channels. One question publishers had to
answer was how closely their shows should reflect the magazines
themselves.
In the case of Hearst, some of the Hello Style shows will be closely inspired by print features like Cosmo’s Sexy vs. Skanky and Marie Claire’s Big Girl in a Skinny World. Car and Driver TV, meanwhile, will mix service and reality shows like Battle of the Beaters, where two auto body shops will compete to fix up heaps; and Driver Rehab, which applies the What Not To Wear formula to bad drivers.
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