Future plc has this week acquired two new properties: WhatCulture, an online entertainment publisher, and Waive, a data company. WhatCulture operates a website with 3m users, 11 YouTube channels and 8m subscribers with two-thirds of its revenue from the US.
It was established in 2006 to cover film but has since expanded into coverage of TV, science news, gaming, music, comics, sport, and books. The Waive platform offers insight on content trends and will sit alongside Future’s existing data insights offer under its Aperture brand which helps advertisers access consumers with purchasing intent. Terms not disclosed.
It is just over two years since Future paid £23.5m (9 x EBITDA) for the TV producer Barcroft Studios which had co-produced the revival of GamesMaster for the UK’s Channel 4. Following the success of ‘Totally Game’, a short form documentary series Barcroft produced with Future, the company has been producing several ‘Future Originals’: an anthology gaming series, and a new true crime series, in partnership with Future’s Marie Claire brand.
That was just the start of a determined push into video by what is now called Future Studios which last year accounted for about £30m of revenue, some 12% of the company’s digital advertising and 5% of total group revenue. Before these latest acquisitions, it was believed that Future’s video revenue this year may exceed £50m (perhaps 6-7% of Future’s total) from the following three streams of activity:
| Future Studios | Owned & Operated (50% of video rev) | AVOD (38%) | TV programmes (12%) |
| What? | Ads funded videos for Future web sites | Ads funded Video on Demand on YouTube, Facebook, and Snapchat. | Work for hire |
| How? | 2,400 videos, 1.6bn views in 2021 | 660 videos, 5.3bn views. 72% CAGR in 5 yrs 30bn subscribers on Snap. Time spent viewing high: 4 x Facebook average | 200 hours, 30 episodes last year incl. Netflix and Channel 4. |
| Next? | News and finance expansion from The Week + Kiplinger | Women and home interest programmes for TV and streaming |
While it has not disclosed the profit margin, Future says its video ads had 1.3bn impressions last year and the revenue yield was 4x that of print advertising. Future’s digital advertising yields jumped by 9% during 2021, presumably driven by video growth.
More important, Future is using its specialist content to good effect because its videos are frequently category winners in a world where advertisers now realise that ‘dwell time’ is more important than clicks. Future’s average video viewing time on Facebook, for example, is 44 seconds compared with a site average of just 10 seconds. These are relatively attentive, high-value audiences and we might expect Future to increasingly invest in video to captivate them.
