To stand a chance against all the streaming competition, new video publishers need two things: a content niche and a durable monetization strategy.
Take Estate Media, an online hub for real estate and home improvement content that launched publicly in September.
Estate Media hopes to hook viewers with content that features influencers in the real estate industry who have a strong online following but lack the scale or resources to produce profitable content on their own, CEO and Co-Founder Griff O’Brien tells me. One of the other co-founders, “Million Dollar Listing” TV star Josh Flagg, helped attract talent with his reputation in the real estate space.
The company wants to attract a range of audiences, from real estate professionals, homebuyers and renters to casual fans of shows and videos about real estate.
Audience diversification is a good way to interest a wider variety of brands. But to monetize content with ads, Estate Media distributes it across YouTube, social media platforms – such as TikTok and Instagram – and newsletters.
Building a foundation
Currently, Estate Media reaches roughly 25 million people through the online profiles of the talent it works with.
Around six months ago, Estate Media’s viewership growth and interest from brands were high enough to justify filling the “gaps in monetization” by raising money, O’Brien tells me. So far, it’s gotten funding from a handful of investors, including Rich Antoniello, former CEO of Complex, and Ricky Van Veen, co-founder of Vimeo. The company is using investments to build up both its talent pool and ad products.
Diversification from a content, revenue and audience standpoint is what a new media company needs to have an effective ads business, Antoniello says, which is why he decided to invest and stick around as an advisor.
The more scale it builds, Antoniello says, the more demand the company will draw from advertisers that will pay for proximity to online personalities that can reach an engaged audience.
Homing in on monetization
Ads are Estate Media’s main moneymaker.
One of the company’s biggest strategies is brand sponsorships and custom content, including product placement (like placing a brand’s appliances into a home before recording a house showing, for example).
Estate also offers video and display ads and allows advertisers to target audiences based on age/gender demos and information it gets from online polls, such as household income, occupation and general location.
The platform categorizes its audience by interest-based segments such as people trying to buy or sell homes, real estate professionals and general consumers of related content. Brands looking to reach agents or homebuyers might target ads to people consuming Estate Media’s newsletters and podcasts for industry updates, O’Brien says, whereas advertisers that want to reach a general audience might opt for a more casual environment (as in videos on YouTube and social media platforms).
Estate Media sells all its ad inventory directly because one-to-one relationships with brands are especially important for an early-stage business, O’Brien says. It measures ad performance based on impressions, clicks, video completion rates and sales using podcast promo codes.
And if Estate Media continues growing its viewership base, O’Brien says, it should be able to attract more ad spend from brands.
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