How Insider Inc. transformed its video performance with JW Player’s Recommendations and Article Matching.

The Challenge

Insider Inc. is one of the world’s most beloved digital news brands, with a team of smart, enterprising journalists who produce quality text and video content across two heavily trafficked sites, Business Insider and Insider. Earlier this year, the company was looking for the optimal solution to lift its video engagement, particularly for click-to-play videos inside articles.

In particular, Insider Inc. wanted to find a solution to recommend contextually relevant videos to site visitors, but the ideal solution was hard to find. When human editors matched videos to Insider and Business Insider articles, the curation process was cumbersome and inefficient. When the publisher developed an in-house solution, the precision of the matching algorithm was not on par with editorial choices.

In order to improve its video performance, Insider Inc. was searching for a technology solution that could match or surpass the curation skills of a human editor while automating the entire workflow of finding, embedding and publishing the most relevant video in a given context. They turned to a long-standing partner, JW Player, to help them continue to innovate solutions to better monetize their video inventory and achieve their business goals.

The Solution

Insider Inc. began using JW Player’s Article Matching and Recommendations to increase video engagement and maximize ad revenue per video.Article Matching selects and inserts the most relevant video for every text article via a proprietary algorithm that analyzes the text and metadata on the page. When Insider Inc. implemented Article Matching on its websites, the publisher observed a sharp increase in key engagement metrics such as CTRs and video completion rates.

Another service, Recommendations, drove additional video views by suggesting the video with the highest likelihood to be watched next. The Recommendations engine is the best in its class, analyzing billions of signals including video metadata and viewer behavior across the JW network to recommend video playlists.

Throughout the implementation process for Article Matching and Recommendations, Insider Inc. benefited from the simplicity and flexibility of these products. Implementing Recommendations entailed a few clicks while the JW support team assisted Insider Inc. to ensure that the Article Matching experience complied with their standard design elements.

The Result

Article Matching and Recommendations had a profound effect on Insider Inc.’s ability to generate video views and hold the attention of its audience. Since adding Article Matching, Insider Inc. has enjoyed a 61% CTR increase, a 114% lift in completed video views and a 97% jump in ad impressions vs. its internal solution. By enabling Recommendations on its videos, Insider Inc. generated 1.3 incremental plays per initial play and .9 incremental ad impressions per initial ad impression across their properties.