Whistle is one of the most dominant content creators in the sports arena. The digital media company helps creators from YouTube, Facebook, and more build out premiere, branded content to improve sales and form connections directly with advertisers.
Whistle digital video properties have pulled in 708.7M total views across all social accounts since January 2019.
Prior to our webinar with Whistle (download the on-demand webinar here!) on August 28, we sat down with Luke Beshar, Director of Analytics and Insights, in a fireside chat to better understand how his team helps creators level up their ad sense and platform monetization. Here’s what he had to say:
Tubular Insights: What’s your strategy for helping content creators understand the analytics behind their videos?
Luke Beshar: Every Tuesday we have a meeting where we meet with and talk with the producers and editors to help them understand how videos are performing out of the gates in terms of retention analysis, early viewership, and even click-through rate.
TI: What do you consider successful content?
LB: We look at it as scatter plots and trend lines per series based on retention, and then look at the residual. What are the key moments that helped keep people interested? And what helped push a video to that 30-second-plus residual? Or what might have gone wrong if it was below that projection?
TI: How do your tactics change the types of videos you create or the video strategy you take on?
LB: A couple things are probably most impactful for us to think about when creating and deciding what content we’re going to make next season: topics, specific talent, and general segment structure. Topics and talent are going to be the biggest ones that have the most potential impact.
TI: How do you work with advertisers?
LB: What we try and paint a picture around is more the attitudes, habits, and behavioral traits that help define our audience.
TI: How do you demonstrate the reach brands can get with your audience?
LB: When we’re pitching advertisers, we lean on traditional metrics you might use to demonstrate scale, whether that’s average views per episode or however many millions or billions of lifetime views have occurred on a certain channel or series.
TI: What changes do you envision in how sports audiences engage with your creators?
LB: There’s just going to be a continued interest and increase in the volume of consumption around some less traditional sports.
There’s also the transition to how people are consuming sports, and how they’re watching it on social platforms. So there’s increased competition for a lot of sports rights.
TI: What role does quality over quantity play in sports content?
LB: Let’s say you have a single channel, single creator, or even a single video service, even if it doesn’t have a certain scale of viewership. You can still prove out that there’s a really engaged audience so long as you look at it within the right category.
Curious to know how Whistle helps sports content creators utilize performance analytics?