We continue exploring the brave new world of television—if it can even be called television. It seems to me there still isn’t even a proper term for it. YouTube-watching?
In short, we’re talking about our live-streaming channel, Navalny LIVE.
It already has 419,000 subscribers, a stable audience, and strong viewer-retention metrics. We have lots of different plans for developing the channel, and we’ll be putting them into action in 2018. One of those plans is to finally figure out whether advertising can be placed on a channel like this, how to do it, and how much it might earn.
That is, we’re not planning to make a profit as such. That’s not why we started this. The channel exists to tell the truth, which is rapidly being pushed out of other media outlets.
We operate on your donations, but if advertising could cover part of the channel’s expenses, what would be wrong with that? Of course, as a nonprofit organization, we would publicly disclose any advertising revenue, if there is any.
Naturally, we have political restrictions when it comes to advertisers. We will not advertise United Russia (the ruling political party) or the Rotenbergs’ businesses.
Naturally, some advertisers will be afraid to place ads with us.
Even so, we at least want to understand how this works, because right now we don’t even have a rough idea of what the model might look like, how much it costs, and so on.
We’re starting the experiment with Cactus, our pioneer and eternal guinea pig.
The program airs every weekday from 9 to 10 a.m.
The first episode of Cactus aired on March 16, 2017. In total, 206 episodes have been released so far.
It has a fairly large audience. The average number of YouTube views over the past six months is 28,700. The average number of views in December was 25,800.
The average Cactus viewer watches for 13 minutes on replay and 17 minutes live. Those are very strong numbers. Not many media outlets can boast metrics like that. What’s more, Cactus—and Navalny LIVE overall—has a very loyal audience. We tell people the truth, and they value that.
Cactus can be watched and listened to through mobile apps on iOS and Android.
Guests on Cactus have included Yuri Dud, Mikhail Zygar, Wylsacom, Ruslan Usachev, Danila Poperechny, Nikolai Sobolev, Tatyana Felgenhauer and Alexander Plushev, Vasya Oblomov, Alexei Venediktov, Pavel Lobkov, Alexei Kortnev, and many others.
The most successful episodes from the past six months: with blogger ItPedia, 140,000 views — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16Ylkrtx0s8 with Yevgeny Ponasenkov, 87,000 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUDluwFlHQ4 with Bozhena Rynska, 77,000 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va4zZDp5LGg
Cactus founders Lyubov Sobol and Nikolai Lyaskin took fourth place in TV Rain’s (an independent Russian TV channel) Journalist of the Year competition:
In other words, it’s an advertiser’s dream.
The problem is that we don’t even know where to start.
So if you
- sell advertising on YouTube and can advise us.
- sell advertising and can sell it for us.
- are an advertiser interested in buying ads on Cactus.
- are a video blogger with extensive experience selling ads and would like to share it.
please write to Oksana Baulina, the channel’s producer, at video@fbk.info
Many thanks in advance.