Streaming Media East 2008 Day 2: How CNNmoney Does It
Caleb Silver, Executive Producer, Video, for CNNmoney.com, took the keynote dais for the second day keynote at Streaming Media East to talk about how CNNmoney puts video on the web. In a freewheeling presentation and a spirited question and answer session, Silver touched on the technology, the people, and the raison d'être for CNNmoney.com using video.
"10% of the video content on our site comes from CNN, while 90% of the content is created by our group; even for the content we use from CNN's feeds across the fiber, we try to get the reporter from that 10% to participate in the channel, doing a wrap-around just for us, or come on our set and talk to Poppy Harlow," said Silver, referring to CNNmoney.com's anchor. "We want the reporters across the world to think we're just another channel that they can engage an audience with."
Silver joined CNNmoney.com in November as employee number 2 in CNNmoney.com's video department. When Silver first came on board, CNNmoney.com was producing one video per day, with about 25,000 hits per day on a good day.
"Now, at the end of April 2008, less than seven months later, we're doing 15-20 video segments per day," said Silver. "A good day is 1 million streams a day and in April 2008, we had almost 14 million streams, from 8.9 million unique viewers."
Silver noted that CNNfn.com was the pioneer in putting video on the web for financial services, and became the backbone for CNNmoney.com in 2006, almost 4 years after CNNfn went off the air. In addition, there are several additional brands under the CNN Money umbrella: Money, which focuses on how to retire, what to do with my money; Fortune, with profiles of the powerful businesses; and Fortune Small Business, which Silver notes makes up a huge amount of the U.S. business economy.
"A foreclosure story is a human story; losing a job, the cost of oil, etc is a human story that can be shown through video," he said. "Our mission is to bring the human story of money to the web and, possibly, to expand that story back to the mainstream cable channels." He added that CNNMoney does significant content sharing with CNN.com and even CNN International and CNN Espanol
The People
Despite being part of CNN prior to coming on board at CNNmoney.com, Silver didn't have a team to start with. Nor did he have equipment and workflow processes down.
"We hired 12 people in 2 months," said Silver, "with over half of them from within CNN: we tapped the best editors, young producers, and storytellers from within CNN and then looked technology-savvy outsiders, including those from our umbrella brands, including Fortune and Money's sites."