In a tough market for digital publishers, sports content remains an ad revenue MVP. And while website display ads have lost their shine for many advertisers, short-form video is still in demand.
The increasing demand for sports and video drove Minute Media’s latest acquisition. On Tuesday, the sports-focused media holding company announced it had acquired VideoVerse. The acquisition will enable publishers to create monetizable short-form video across Minute Media’s portfolio of sports-focused properties, including Sports Illustrated, The Players’ Tribune and FanSided.
As part of the deal, Minute Media is acquiring VideoVerse’s Magnifi software, which uses AI tech to cut longer video content and full-length games into bite-size clips. This capability will add a more personalized, contextually aligned pool of video inventory to Minute Media’s STN Video platform, Rich Routman, president of Minute Media, told AdExchanger.
The sports video playbook
Minute Media did not disclose the deal price for the VideoVerse acquisition. But Routman said it was paid for with a mix of cash and stock and comprises “one of the most meaningful” deals the company has completed in its 13-year history.
Minute Media will retain all of VideoVerse’s employees. “No changes are planned to their business,” Routman added.
The acquisition isn’t just about growing the number of monetizable videos Minute Media can serve as a publisher, Routman said. It’s a play to solidify STN Video as a distribution and monetization platform for sports broadcast rights holders by automating the editing of professional sports clips into a TikTok-esque format.
“If it increases the impressions by a certain amount, that’s great,” Routman said. But he added that the bigger opportunity is offering readers bespoke sports video content tailored to the articles they’re reading and distributing that experience across not only Minute Media’s portfolio but third-party publishers as well.
Through STN Video, Minute Media has distribution and monetization deals with partners who hold broadcast rights with a variety of major pro sports leagues, Routman said. He declined to name these leagues on the record, owing to sensitivities around public disclosures.
Using video sourced from these broadcast rights holders, STN Video’s video player serves content on more than 1,000 sites on desktop and mobile. These sites include national publications like SB Nation and The Sporting News, baseball stat tracker Baseball Reference (via an integration with ad network Freestar), as well as smaller blogs dedicated to specific teams.
Routman envisions using VideoVerse’s Magnifi tech to create video reels that are hyper-targeted to a site visitor’s interest. For example, if the visitor tends to read a lot about a particular team, he said, they would see curated feeds of that team’s highlights, compilations of specific plays and even reels dedicated to particular players.
Playing defense against pricing pressure
STN Video’s placements include instream video that’s the primary focus of the page, as well as accompanying content displayed in floating video players. Its video inventory is mostly sold through direct deals, Routman said, but it can also be transacted on programmatically.
Currently, overall CPMs for online video are being depressed, which some industry watchers have pegged as the market reacting to the IAB Tech Lab’s new video classification standards. Creating a distinction between “instream” and “accompanying content” was part of those new standards.
But Routman believes online video CPMs are depressed by an explosion in available supply. Minute Media plans to protect its business from this supply-related drop in CPMs by offering more premium content, he said, including contextually relevant experiences. And sports content – especially when it’s sourced from pro leagues – remains highly in demand in upfront negotiations, he added.
With the VideoVerse acquisition, editing premium video for distribution across STN Video’s network and finding contextual fits to the on-page content will become a much faster, more automated process, Routman said.
Plus, the acquisition will open up opportunities for Minute Media to distribute more video across its owned-and-operated social media properties, he said. And it could eventually enable distribution across social accounts owned by third-party pubs, he added, but the main focus will be on serving video within publisher pages.
Taken altogether, the VideoVerse deal lets Minute Media and STN Video offer a “more holistic” video solution for pro sports rights holders, Routman said. Rather than just coming in at one step of the content creation or monetization process, he said, “now we’re involved in creation, distribution and monetization.”
