Building a video strategy publishers can own, with Minute’s Kyle Orr

BY ROB BEELER + KYLE ORR, SVP OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT AT MINUTE

AI overviews and zero-click search have, in many cases, pulled the floor out from under publisher referral traffic, and the display revenue tied to it. Video has sat on the priority list for years, but the economics and the execution have both gotten harder. Players, content, direct demand, programmatic demand and distribution tend to be bought, measured and owned separately, which leaves publishers managing a set of disconnected decisions rather than a strategy.

Rob spoke to Kyle Orr, SVP of Business Development at Minute about where video economics break down, the categories opening up beyond sports, how publishers should split what they build from what they hand to a partner, which formats belong where, and where first-party data does the most for yield.

Rob: Video has been a publisher priority for years, but the economics and execution keep getting harder. What makes this the moment to rethink video?

Kyle: We all feel the pain publishers are under from AI and zero-click search, and we believe owning your audience is the way forward. As a publisher ourselves, with brands including Sports Illustrated and FanSided, we’ve built video strategies that deliver on the value exchange with the reader.

Premium, rights-held, contextually relevant video that people actually engage with creates a sustainable revenue stream and attracts direct budgets from top-tier advertisers. Tech advances such as AI workflows, our proprietary SmartMatch technology and native interactive elements automate much of the work, so teams stay focused on editorial. They also let publishers build immersive, interactive environments instead of flat sites.

Rob: Minute is known for sports, but your content and demand capabilities go well beyond it. Where are the biggest untapped video opportunities in other categories?

Kyle: Entertainment, lifestyle, business, finance and gaming have all opened up recently. A partner that brings top-tier video in any category and pairs it with direct-sold dollars lets publishers stop chasing short-term revenue and commit to a longer-term plan.

We’re already seeing success within these categories, built on what we’ve learned in sports, one of the largest and most crowded media sectors, where timing is everything. Because the library has to cover every category a publisher writes about, we ingest between 2,000 and 5,000 videos a day from content partners.

Rob: When publishers tell you video isn’t delivering the return they expected, where do the economics start to break down?

Kyle: It comes down to the value created by the video player. A below-the-fold outstream player is worth something completely different from a contextually relevant accompanying-content player placed high in the article. There is a solution for every page type, but the experience has to work for the reader and the advertiser. An aggressive video ad strategy gives a tempting short-term boost, though rarely a sustainable one.

Rob: Publishers can build video capability internally, license content or lean on outside partners. How should they decide what they need to own, and when is licensing worth the effort?

Kyle: It doesn’t have to be one or the other. I see the best strategies come together when a publisher picks a partner that supports every side of the business: ingesting the publisher’s own content, backing it with a wider library, then combining both sets of programmatic and direct demand to put pressure on the auction.

The direct piece is where the gap usually shows up; rights-held content attracts budgets that never reach the open auction, and few publishers have the volume to license that content themselves. The same goes for a player: building one is expensive, so find a partner who does it full time. That said, do create video that is hyper-local to your market, but remember that video is a volume game, and you don’t want the same clip running across dozens of articles and formats.

Rob: Publishers now have more choice in how video shows up, from horizontal players to vertical. What should determine which format belongs where?

Kyle: Part experimentation, part research, and part what suits the site and its audience. Vertical players have worked well for us on home pages and section fronts, outstream performs on pages with longer dwell times, and instream or accompanying-content players do well as featured media inside articles. Find a partner who will run structured head-to-head tests and optimize against live data as they go, so you can build a video strategy unique to your business.

Rob: Publishers are under pressure to earn more from the audiences they already have. Where does first-party data improve video performance most?

Kyle: First-party data has a significant impact on yield. Across our owned and operated sites and the publishers we support, we’ve seen programmatic CPMs rise by up to 30% when first-party data is passed through the player into the bid stream. It’s an important question to ask your video partner, because it’s one of the quickest revenue wins available.

Focus on every opportunity to collect email addresses and other valuable data. Over time, publishers and the video player can begin to recognize users to serve them better content and also more relevant ads.

Rob: A lot of video partners are judged on programmatic monetization alone. What gets missed when the player, content, direct demand, programmatic demand and distribution are treated as separate decisions?

Kyle: It happens often, because teams across the organization have different priorities. The commercial cost is that the two pools of demand never compete. If a publisher’s own advertiser relationships sit in one system and a partner’s demand in another, each only wins what it can on its own. Bring them into the same auction and every impression clears at the highest bid available, whoever brought it. That’s incremental revenue by definition; the publisher keeps what it already had and adds on top.

Fixing that starts inside the business. Our best partnerships have buy-in from editorial, sales, product and operations, since a video player touches nearly every part of the business. The strongest strategies come from publishers who judge video on its long-term value to the audience, the advertiser and their own teams.

Rob: If a publisher were rebuilding its video strategy from scratch for 2027, what would you tell them to stop doing, start doing and never compromise on?

Kyle: I would say start with the audience. If owning that audience is the priority, the strategy has to deliver on the value exchange. Running low-quality or unlicensed content while maximizing ad requests will push RPMs up quickly, but it will not hold.

Focus on quality placement and quality content, and judge it on metrics that reflect the audience rather than the ad request. RPU rather than RPM. Average watch time and videos per user. Page-load impact, because a player that costs you Core Web Vitals is costing you the audience you just built. Those are the signals that earn direct sales dollars and premium programmatic rates.

Ready to own your audience with video?

Zero-click search and unpredictable referral traffic are not going away, but the video decisions publishers make in response are within their control. Kyle’s argument runs from judging the player on the value it creates rather than the requests it fires, through the categories opening up beyond sports, the balance between building and licensing, matching format to page type, feeding first-party data into the bid stream, and treating content, demand and distribution as a single decision.

Minute works with publishers in every category to build video strategies that support editorial, sales and yield at once. Get in touch to talk through what that could look like for your titles.

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