The Media Odyssey

Evan Shapiro: [00:00:00] That is the other, I think, major mythology or misunderstanding is you can test and learn, and if it does cannibalize or it does siphon off money from other areas of the organization, you stop.

Marion Ranchet: You pull the plug.

Evan Shapiro: You take it down. That test and learn is the big kind of core value.

Paul Mcgrath: You know, so, I'm using this phrase internally, like I talk about cannibalization.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah. This is not an unusual story, but it is. Yeah, it is.

Marion Ranchet: Of course.

Paul Mcgrath: I've been calling it the Loch Ness Monster. People talk about it, but I've never seen it.

Marion Ranchet: We have a guest. [00:01:00] Let's move to English because Yeah. There's no way Evan can do that, but actually we could do it.

Evan Shapiro: All can. Yeah, exactly. That's funny. Yeah. So we have a special guest, a friend of the pod and a real special guest who has a really fun story to tell us from CBC, Paul McGrath.

Welcome to the pod.

Marion Ranchet: Hi, Paul.

Paul Mcgrath: Thank you.

Evan Shapiro: What is your title? What is your official title there at CBC?

Paul Mcgrath: I'm the senior director of strategy and audience development for the entertainment unit.

Evan Shapiro: What the hell does that mean?

Paul Mcgrath: So we spend a lot of time thinking about how do we reach and engage new audiences on new platforms?

How do we distribute our content and how do we, in sort of broad strokes, transition a legacy media company to become a digital focused media company.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah. And tell us about CBC. CBC is a public service media organization. It is the public [00:02:00] broadcaster of Canada. But tell us about the current operational state of CBC in Canada.

Paul Mcgrath: So yeah, the, we're the public service broadcaster. We are about 90 years old. CBC was originally founded back in the, geez, I think 1940s. The origins were really around radio and then expanded out into television. And we've had a long history of doing that.

And then for the last 20, 25 years, also, the expansion into digital spaces, websites, apps social, YouTube, TikTok, et cetera. Very, very broadly, we have been wrestling, I guess, with the transition of the audience from linear platforms to digital platforms over the last 20 years.

And personally I have been involved in that work in one way or another for most of that time. I've been at the company for about 20 years now. [00:03:00]

Evan Shapiro: Wow.

Marion Ranchet: Paul, can I ask you, when I hear public, my mind goes to how is your company, your organization funded? Is it the government, is there a license fee? Can you do advertising? As a European it's, immediately, I have those bells ringing.

Paul Mcgrath: Yeah, so we have a bit of a hybrid funding model. So there is a chunk about, roughly a third of our funding is coming from advertising. And then about two thirds of the funding is coming from a government appropriation.

And then, we also have sort of a French service and an English service. They're, the funding kind of spills out into both of those services.

Marion Ranchet: Okay. Super interesting.

Evan Shapiro: And you work on the streaming app, the CTV app, audience development in, within that area, right?

Paul Mcgrath: I do a lot of strategy and strategy execution work around that area. And then I also have another hat, which is really focused on YouTube because [00:04:00] in the last year as an organization, we made a bet and we made a big strategic bet to say there's something happening on YouTube.

We hadn't put a lot of focus on it over the last, the preceding few years, and we said we need to put a strategic focus on it. That was a project that I took on with a lot of people and a number of colleagues, and I split that out.

Evan Shapiro: What was the attitude that you had towards the, and I don't mean you particular, I think your attitude was this was an area that we should be exploring and we should be exploiting, but prior to about a year ago, what was the organizational attitude at CBC towards YouTube and social video at large?

Paul Mcgrath: I think it was probably similar to the experience of many media companies and many studios. We had gone through a cycle where we launched our own streaming service. We really wanted to focus on expanding that streaming service, really wanna focus on acquiring new [00:05:00] audience. And we had to learn a lot after the launch of that service.

As an organization, we had to learn, you know, how does retention work? How does churn work? How does product development work?

Evan Shapiro: A whole different business going

Paul Mcgrath: Exactly.

Evan Shapiro: The consumer fashion.

Paul Mcgrath: Yeah, it's a it's a difficult business. It's a complicated business. It's an expensive business and we had to learn all of that. And as a result of that, for a few years, we really put a specific focus on growing that service. That service is called CBC Gem. And we learned a lot over the course of those years.

Evan Shapiro: And built in audience, a user base of that app and that service, that's pretty healthy. Absolutely.

Paul Mcgrath: Absolutely. We're just coming off the most successful year we have ever had with that service. So it, that experience paid off over time.

And at the same time, over the course of that of that sort of learning curve, we started to get more and more data and more and more reporting that was showing the size of YouTube in this [00:06:00] space.

And I think one of the first reports we got was around was the fall of 2023. October, 2023. Around there. We got a first look at a, at an MVP reporting from Numeris, which is similar to Nielsen in the United States.

And that reporting showed that if you stacked up all of the streamers, all of the social, all of the TV broadcast, cable, everything together, that YouTube, standalone, was number one in terms of total viewing across all devices. And that was the first time we'd ever gotten that snapshot.

And this was a, I forget the first time the gauge came out in the United States, but it was a few months preceding that. And when that happened, it it made us take notice.

There's something here, we need to think about this, we need to this. We need to we need to think about a plan here. We need to put together a strategy here and we need to figure out to what degree are we prioritizing that.

Evan Shapiro: So you're [00:07:00] grappling internally on how to take advantage of this new burgeoning distribution platform.

And then you came, you convened, we were talking about it, actually, we were recording it, so we have this on camera, but you convened a meeting to go over this stuff and what was great is you had done all this thinking and research. You had numbers of internal metrics to share with the team, but they hadn't necessarily been shared in such a way where a decision was the desired outcome.

Paul Mcgrath: There was not consensus. At that point, by the time we gotta talk to you, Evan, in Toronto, there was probably a two or three months of conversations and meetings that proceeded that. And the consensus wasn't there because of, there was concerns about audience cannibalization, there was concerns about undercutting our revenue, our streaming revenue, [00:08:00] and/or linear revenue if we go to a new platform like YouTube.

Evan Shapiro: Two things: one, was there data to back up the cannibalization fear?

Paul Mcgrath: No. So, I'm using this phrase internally, like I talk about cannibalization.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah. This is not an unusual story, but it is. Yeah, it is.

Marion Ranchet: Of course.

Paul Mcgrath: I've been calling it the Loch Mess Monster. People talk about it, but I've never seen it.

Evan Shapiro: And in fact, you had data that contradicted that. Correct?

Paul Mcgrath: We have it now, but that's after a year of doing this.

Evan Shapiro: Had it then too. Had some then too as well.

Paul Mcgrath: We had some then it just didn't feel like that data was conclusive enough to address the concern and the concerns are valid.

And if you've been working in digital for a while, you'll also remember that these concerns came up when we started publishing on Facebook and up as well when we starting think about a streaming and will it cannibalize our linear services.

So it is a bit of a repeating trend in the [00:09:00] industry that we talk about this canibalization concern. And it's also very hard to put a pin in it to get conclusive data that says yes or no.

Evan Shapiro: So you, we had this convening in Toronto and it, there was already a willingness and a, an openness to do it, but because the senior team all agreed, looked each other in the eye and said, we're gonna at least try it, right?.

That was the, that is the other, I think, major mythology or misunderstanding is you can test and learn, like you can try this stuff out, and if it does cannibalize or it does siphon off money from other areas of the organization, you stop.

Marion Ranchet: You pull the plug.

Evan Shapiro: You take it down. Test and learn and the big, major core value of this new era of distribution.

So you give it a try. What does that look like though? So you leave that room and was there a reallocation of resources or a refocusing of teams, or, you don't have to get into too much detail, obviously you don't wanna break any confidences, but what did day one of that new look [00:10:00] look like to you?

Paul Mcgrath: Well, we came out of that session and I mean, I think maybe by the end of that session, or within days after, my boss and my boss's boss's boss asked for a proposal and said, what do we need here? What do we need to do? What is the investment that's required to make this happen and how should we go about it?

Evan Shapiro: They were all in the room for that conversation too, by the way, right?

Paul Mcgrath: That's right. That's right. So, you know, we came out of that room with consensus at least to say, let's place a bet here. And if it doesn't work out, then we're gonna know within a year whether it works out or not.

We put that proposal together in about a couple of weeks, secured some funding, and were able to bring a team together to set up like an internal community of practice, a knowledge hub within our organization. We kind of avoided a lot of reorg conversations as part of that. We didn't wanna get into too much because that takes forever and involves a whole bunch of HR stuff. [00:11:00]

So we avoided that. That allowed us to relatively quickly. And then also because there were some of these concerns, and I think it's very important to listen to figure out how can we address them, we also put some kind of guard rails or safe guards in place. That, in the process of doing this, let's study cannibalization. Let's see if we can get as close as possible to some data on this to find out does this actually happen and to what extent.

And I was skeptical of the notion of it, but I have to say, I was super grateful for the fact that we did the work to get the data on it because I think we learned a lot from studying it in a proper kind of scientific empirical fashion.

Marion Ranchet: Okay. So Paul, once you had that team in place, and I'm assuming you know, you divided and and conquered, how much content did you put? What type [00:12:00] of content? And I'm both talking, long form versus short and the different genres.

Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Paul Mcgrath: Yeah, absolutely. One of the first tasks that team had was to look at our catalog to work with our business and rights team to figure out which of, how much of the catalog is cleared and can we distribute onto YouTube, and then to get a list together. It ended up being about 50 titles, about 500 hours of content.

It was full episodes, full seasons. And then with that team, we started publishing that content, twice a week throughout the course of the summer on a long publishing schedule. We're actually not

Evan Shapiro: Library content, rolling it out?

Paul Mcgrath: That's right.

Evan Shapiro: Weekly schedule.

Paul Mcgrath: Back catalog content. So it was, 50 titles of content that we already had published on our streaming service. In some case, that content was published on our streaming service two or three years previously.[00:13:00] And then we republished it on YouTube for these full episodes.

In addition to that, so as that was happening, we were also implementing strategies to increase our long form content across the board. And a lot of this was more centered on the news division where we're doing more live content

Evan Shapiro: On YouTube?

Paul Mcgrath: On YouTube, that's right. Increasing our volume of original YouTube content, which is also like often longer than 20 minutes. So there was a few different things happening, but publishing that catalog was a big part of it just because it's a lot of content. I think we did about 100 hours in the first three months.

Evan Shapiro: Oh wow. And how many channels, how many YouTube channels do you run?

Marion Ranchet: Yeah, I had the same question.

Paul Mcgrath: It's about 50 channels across the board.

Evan Shapiro: Right, okay. Okay.

Marion Ranchet: 50?

Paul Mcgrath: 50, 5-0

Marion Ranchet: Oh, wow. Okay, and so

Evan Shapiro: Yeah, all news. Also, there's sports and kids and a whole bunch of other stuff, right?

Paul Mcgrath: Right. Documentary content. [00:14:00] There are some show-specific channels that we're running for individual IP.

And then there's a number of news regional channels and then a bunch of entertainment channels, et cetera.

Marion Ranchet: And Paul when you did that, did you do it on your own? Because YouTube is very much an open platform, and so did you just go for it? Or did you have a one-on-one relationship with YouTube in Canada somehow.

Paul Mcgrath: I didn't do any of this on my own, is what I'm

Marion Ranchet: Yeah. I Know.

Evan Shapiro: Yeah, he did it all right from that desk right there.

Paul Mcgrath: But yes, we absolutely have a great relationship with YouTube.

Marion Ranchet: Okay.

Paul Mcgrath: And that relationship started about a couple of years ago in which, I forget if they reached out or we reached out, but we connected.

And from that relationship, we don't always see eye to eye with some of the social platforms, but I can remember talking to our rep at YouTube and saying, in this instance, [00:15:00] right now, I think we have the same vision and we should work together and we should build up a partnership.

So yes, we work closely with the YouTube team and continue to do so.

Evan Shapiro: So how long have you been in this new mode that you would say. leaning into YouTube as a distribution platform?

Paul Mcgrath: It started in the spring of 2024. So we're just now closing off. Yeah, we're just about finishing our first 12 months of this sort of this bet and this new approach.

Evan Shapiro: So let's take a look at the numbers now. When you look at the numbers right now, if I understand this correctly, 20% of your overall content across your 50 channels or so is long form, which you mean 20 minutes or 30 minutes or longer.

Paul Mcgrath: 20 minutes.

Evan Shapiro: 20 minutes or longer. But of the series and other titles that you've put out there, a lot of it is not just 20 minutes or longer, some of it's an hour or so, correct?

Paul Mcgrath: Yeah, that's right. Our documentary content, for instance, is often gonna be an hour, sometimes [00:16:00] more. Some of the live stuff, if we're doing, say a press conference or something from the news division, that will be, could be 40 minutes long, could be longer. So it, it's a mix.

Evan Shapiro: So of the, of your overall content, and we're talking about probably thousands of hours here, about 20% of it is long form, 20 minutes or longer, but that 20% is 47%, almost half, of total usage.

Paul Mcgrath: That's right.

Evan Shapiro: So it's punching more than 2x above its weight.

Paul Mcgrath: Totally. And I was actually surprised to see how large it was, given that, you know that other 80%, there's a lot of short content in there. Less than a minute, maybe less than two minutes. A lot of that content gets millions of views, right?

So I was, I had an expectation that at least in aggregate, that would account for a large amount of the total watch time. But I think there's a dynamic here that, especially with connected TVs, especially with YouTube strategy around owning the [00:17:00] living room, that long form content is over performing on the platform right now.

I didn't expect it to be to this extent, but it is.

Evan Shapiro: Do you know how much, Paul, how much of your usage is on connected television? Do you get a sense of that?

Paul Mcgrath: At the start of the year, it was around 40%, and I think it's been creeping up month by month. So I think it's around 45, 50% right now. Of our watch time is coming from connected TV, and then after that it breaks down to like mobile and, desktop, mobile or computers and everything else.

Evan Shapiro: And that's probably disproportionately the section that goes to long form. This is the rest of the data. So you increased the overall amount of long form content across all those channels. 55% right? And then total watch time across all those channels went up 65%, so higher than that.

But the channels that, where you put, you concentrated the library content on, are the entertainment channels and the CBC channel. Is that, my understanding correct there? [00:18:00]

Paul Mcgrath: Yeah, that's right. So there's broadly, there's two large divisions at CBC. There's the entertainment division and there's the news division.

The entertainment division has a number of channels, and those channels were publishing in some cases, full episodes or compilations or long form content. Most of that catalog, though, that I was talking about, these 50 titles and these 500 hours of content, was published just on that single CBC channel, which coincidentally is the one that grew the most in this graph, but also of many of our channels.

So that's where a lot of the long form content was concentrated. I wouldn't say at the same time that it was just because of the full episode content that we saw growth across the board. We increased our publishing volume of shorts and long form and lives. I know a whole bunch of other things.

So as a result, everything went up pretty dramatically, but there definitely a pattern here for creators, for media companies: if you have a library of long form content, you can take advantage of it and surf [00:19:00] that wave of growth on YouTube towards long form content.

Evan Shapiro: And crucially, what you found was this was a younger, discreet audience from what had watched these, this content in other areas on your app or on television.

It was a younger, by many years, than broadcast and then even a significant amount over, under streaming as well.

Paul Mcgrath: What we did is. We took the 50 titles that we had published on YouTube that were also previously published on our streaming service. And then we looked at all of those titles one by one and said from the date that it was published on YouTube, did it have an impact on engagement and consumption on our streaming service.

Then we looked at that in a 30 day window and we looked at that in a 100 day window. So take all the titles that we published on YouTube and from the date that they're all published, what was the impact on our streaming service?

If the hypothesis is cannibalization, [00:20:00] you would expect that when you publish on a different platform like YouTube, it would take away from the consumption you get on your streaming service.

The net result that we found from studying that, was the opposite. It actually increased the engagement on our streaming service from the date it was published on YouTube.

Evan Shapiro: Wow.

Paul Mcgrath: Not causality though.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah.

Paul Mcgrath: This is not causality.

Evan Shapiro: Coincidence. They happen simultaneous, right?

Paul Mcgrath: It happened simultaneously and what we think was happening was that we had windowed the content that we published on YouTube to align to premier dates on the streaming service, which therefore has a marketing campaign around it. And therefore we think what happened is, we got a lift both on YouTube as well as on the streaming service from publishing in both places.

Marion Ranchet: So you focused on the IP, you focused on the IP.

Paul Mcgrath: We focused on the IP.

Marion Ranchet: [00:21:00] You put library ahead of premier of new content, or

Paul Mcgrath: That's right.

Marion Ranchet: Okay. So let's,

Paul Mcgrath: So it was largely timed to line up with the premier of, on the streaming service. So say a week before we would publish a previous season for the new premier and then the other thing we found from this research is that there is a very distinct pattern of audience decay or audience retention over time. Meaning that from the date that you publish a title on your streaming service or on YouTube, there's a predictable pattern of consumption that decreases over time. So same as DVD sales back in the day, they don't last forever.

But, in looking at that and understanding that pattern, what we noticed is, first of all, those windows in which you get most of your consumption on your streaming service are quite a bit shorter than we had [00:22:00] expected. And two, what we found was, there's probably an opportunity to take advantage of the halo effect given the window is short.

So originally our publishing approach on YouTube was more like take your titles, publish them on YouTube, say a year later. Now what we're thinking about is to say, okay, so if there is this pattern of audience decay and it's quite a bit shorter than what you expect, it allows us to ask the question, what is the appropriate time at which you should be moving your distribution from your streaming service to YouTube and/or Netflix or Amazon or whichever others because the windows of time that you can extract that consumption from your streaming service are relatively short which allows you then to say, okay, I've gotten the value from this title on this service. Let's move to the next one because it's a new audience.

Marion Ranchet: I love that. I love that so much.

No, but I love it because everyone [00:23:00] is, all the industry discussion is, again around cannibalization, et cetera, but to the point you were making at the top of the episode, at some point you had only TV, so this was what you were playing with. And then you had streaming, and so you had to mind this and the other.

Okay. TV window, streaming window. Now you have social, you have YouTube, and then you have to bring that into your windowing strategy. But there's a smart way of being available across all of those platforms. And to your point test and learn. I'm not saying it will work every time, huh? But it's just, it's history repeating.

Just you mentioned Netflix, people didn't wanna put anything on Netflix. Guess what? There's a way to keep monetizing that library and instead of living it idle somewhere in an ivory tower, you take it somewhere else. It's YouTube, it's other places.

Evan Shapiro: I think though, I, what I would amend to that is this goes from a windowing strategy to a flywheel strategy.

So if you think about the [00:24:00] the life cycle of a piece of IP that we were just discussing, so after it goes from broadcast and streaming app, which are now simultaneous, right? For the most part, Paul?

Paul Mcgrath: In some cases we go streaming first, but yes, largely.

Evan Shapiro: Right. But after, so the most premium is streaming. So after it goes to the most premium, which would be streaming the, when it goes to social video, what you're showing here is that the revenue you generated in this window increased 68% by also putting this content here.

So it outpaced the amount of new original long form content you were putting here. But, explain that for a second. 'cause you're selling this inventory, correct?

Paul Mcgrath: We are selling and we're, yes, we're monetizing all of this inventory. So the, I think there's a couple of kind of benefits to it. As a media company, you have your linear monetization, you have your streaming monetization, and audience reach, and engagement consumption, all those benefits.

Then you have your social monetization, [00:25:00] which YouTube, in comparison to other social platforms is particularly

Evan Shapiro: For today though, that's gonna expand if TikTok survives in North America. But there will be other social video and Meta in particular, I think, will get much more into these types of profit sharing cycles.

Paul Mcgrath: For sure, and especially as the industry money keeps moving toward these platforms. I think the monetization opportunities will increase. So therefore, the first movers that are moving now will probably have some advantages to capture more of that shift.

Evan Shapiro: And then, so you're monetizing this exposure on this social platform, right? So this is a new audience, an additive audience to you both demographically speaking, but I think you have research that shows that it's even deeper than that. And you're monetizing this new audience.

And then also, this is where it becomes the flywheel. It is promoting the mothership because you saw, not only was there not cannibalization, but there was increased usage on the streaming app of certain IP. [00:26:00] And, if I remember correctly from what you said at the beginning, you had the most successful streaming app year that you've ever had.

So while this was all happening on social video, all boats ride, rose for you because you were just, long story short, reaching a larger aggregate audience as a result of all this work. So that's where the, it goes from windowing to it's a virtuous cycle here. It is a flywheel.

Paul Mcgrath: A couple things on that. One is, I use the term that YouTube in some ways is a bit of a triple threat. It allows you to reach new audiences that are often younger. It allows you to publish content on the platform that also correlates to viewership on your streaming service. And it allows you new revenue.

On the point of correlation to your streaming service, that's the research that Natasha did at Warner Brothers. [00:27:00] So what she did is, she did a large study, she took 15 titles and looked at the streaming audience, and then engaged with a third party that had a panel of 3 million users.

From that panel, kind of reversed engineered, did any of these users consume short form content on YouTube, TikTok, Insta, whatever, other platforms prior to watching the streaming, the streaming title. One of these 15 titles.

She found a really strong correlation, I forget her number, I thought it was like 85% correlation between consuming on social and then converting, convert to watching on streaming. So if you back up on that a little bit, and think of it from the point of view of a triple thread, it can be, YouTube can be a very effective marketing platform to convert to streaming, but it can also allow you [00:28:00] to reach and engage a younger audience and a new audience, and it can be monetize you at the same time.

So the benefits there, if you think of it, not in terms of the threat of cannibalization, but the opportunity to reach and engage audience, they kind of add up on top of each other.

Marion Ranchet: So what's next for you guys? Because when you look at this, so number one, all green.

Is it beyond, did you put numbers when you did that experiment a year ago? This is where

Evan Shapiro: Yeah, did you pick a target?

Marion Ranchet: I'd like to be. And where are you vis-a-vis those numbers. Question number one and question number two, what's next? What does your tool look like for you guys?

Paul Mcgrath: So our target at the start of the year was to grow by 25%. The background on that target was

Evan Shapiro: To grow what? To grow what 25%?

Paul Mcgrath: Our total watch time on all of our channels. So that group of 50 channels. We wanted to grow watch time by 25% by the end of the year. That was coming off of a couple of years where our [00:29:00] watch time in total had been declining pretty significantly.

So that scared us. It was a scary target internally, it caused anxiety. And we were worried about hitting that target, and honestly, we missed that target for two or three months in a row right when we get started. So it wasn't looking great at the start.

Over time, I think the teams were really innovative to come up with a whole bunch of solutions on their own in order to figure out what can I do to contribute to this target and to help hit this target.

And by the year, I think our total growth is going to be 65% or somewhere in that range. So well exceeding that target.

Where do we wanna next year. I just got that question this week and

Marion Ranchet: Oh, I'm sure you did, because now the, if you had 25 and you did what, 65? Next year's gonna be tough.

Evan Shapiro: That's total, but if you look at the channels where the, it seems that the strategy was most invested [00:30:00] was in your entertainment channels, which was I think across 17 or 18 channels there, and CBC, that's, you can see where, that's where the meat of the strategy paid off.

Is that accurate?

Paul Mcgrath: I would say that there was the highest relative growth in some of those channels because you have the numbers here and our news channels still account for a large proportion of our total engagement, our total watch time. And because of rate now that news cycle is so...

Marion Ranchet: There's a lot.

Paul Mcgrath: What's the word? Yeah, a lot. There is a lot. There is a lot of it that is also boosting our engagement.

Evan Shapiro: That's interesting.

Paul Mcgrath: I think what we have to figure out now, we always have to do this kind of math. How much of this is the band and how much of this is the stage?

And we're trying to figure it out. Are we just getting lifted right now because of the news cycle or is it because of the training, the best practices, all the innovative approaches that all the teams have taken. [00:31:00]

And probably the answer is a mix of both. But what we're really focusing on now is doubling down on skills development for YouTube, doubling down on best practices, making sure everyone has the support so that if this is a bit of a sugar high, just because of the news cycle that we have something, best practices to fall back on to continue that growth.

Marion Ranchet: That's awesome.

Evan Shapiro: Is the revenue now material from YouTube for the organization?

Paul Mcgrath: Getting closer. It's much smaller than the revenue from our streaming services.

Evan Shapiro: Obviously.

Paul Mcgrath: Of course. It's, are there additional opportunities?

Evan Shapiro: They're in it a year at this point really?

Paul Mcgrath: Yeah, that's right. I mean we're a year into it.

Marion Ranchet: The CPM are much lower, no? I think on the French market, we're seeing maybe five, seven euros for YouTube when we're seeing 20 on CTV. So

Paul Mcgrath: I won't quote numbers, but yeah, the connected TV inventory: way higher [00:32:00] CPM. We're seeing high CPMs on our FAST channels, which is by the way, also another exceptional area of growth that we've seen.

And then the CPMs on YouTube are lower, and it really depends on what the content is. Some content will have, there's a lot of variability in the CPMs on YouTube.

Evan Shapiro: Are you selling, are you selling your FAST or is that -- and so do you package the network, the FAST, the OTT and YouTube together as an audience?

Paul Mcgrath: Yeah, we do. So we sell it all as bulk inventory from different sources. And that direct sales approach is one of the areas where we've seen the strongest growth in revenue on YouTube.

Evan Shapiro: Doesn't that enable you then to pull up CPMs across the board? 'cause the younger audiences would typically be what would be, for many advertisers, really attractive.

I'm curious as to, does that help you get to a CPM for the total audience, or are you still segmenting them by platform at that point?

Paul Mcgrath: We still segment them by platform. This is not my area of expertise, but we do it because the shares are different. So [00:33:00] like the YouTube revenue share is different.

They operate on a kind of floor price when you're doing the direct sales. So the shares on different platforms are gonna be different. So therefore we just look at them individually, because you can't add them together.

Marion Ranchet: Whoa. That was,

Evan Shapiro: Yeah. So anyway, this is I think, thank you. Yeah. This is great story. If there is one takeaway, if there was one lesson that everybody can take away from your example for success in this area, what do you think that would be?

Paul Mcgrath: It's check your assumptions. If we can adopt a posture where we don't assume the world to be a certain way or a way we want it to be and adopt a posture where we are curious and wanna learn about how our audience consumes. I think what will happen is we will be surprised and we will be more nimble and more effective in how we approach distributing content across many platforms. My mantra [00:34:00] these days is take your IP and amortize it across as many platform as you can.

That's essentially the game now. So I think the data can really help inform that.

Evan Shapiro: Husk and all. Great. That's a great case study. Thank you so much for sharing this research with us first.

Thank you for doing the homework frankly. Not just taking the swing and taking this chance and having it pay off, but also to do the homework, the research that can help so many other people learn from it.

It sounds like that was your intention from the start. So thank you for that. Thanks for being a great guest.

Marion, that was a great episode. I hope you had a good time on this ride.

Marion Ranchet: I did.

Evan Shapiro: It's fascinating for me.

Marion Ranchet: Yeah. I think we, it's great to have more examples. So we had Matt from Channel 4, now Paul from CBC.

I think, those trends are similar across the globe, but it's very interesting to see different companies in different markets go about it. And there's some similarities, but some differences as well. I wanna keep doing that. I think this is where people get a lot of [00:35:00] value from from the pod.

And yeah. Thank you for coming over.

Paul Mcgrath: Absolutely, it was a pleasure.

Evan Shapiro: That is Marion Ranchet, and your newsletter is called

Marion Ranchet: Streaming Made Easy. And this is Evan Shapiro. Your newsletter is

Evan Shapiro: Media, say Media War and Peace.

Marion Ranchet: Ah. Well done.

Evan Shapiro: Bien, a bientôt, au revoir.

Marion Ranchet: Oh my goodness, Paul. Paul,

Evan Shapiro: Until next time.

Paul Mcgrath: You have to practice

Evan Shapiro: On the podcast. Bye.

Marion Ranchet: Salut.