local media insider
Review

YouNews becoming a standard feature on local city sites

Alisa Cromer
Posted
Videos can roll-up into a national channel which schedules its own national contests, or remain private labled.

Video equipped iPhone and other devices have made user-generated video content easier to acquire.

One popular way of collecting the content, is through a partnership with Broadcast Interactive Media's (BIM) YouNewsTV.

There are two ways to partner; directly or private label. For example, YouNewsTV powers UG content for several local television station sites owned by McGraw-Hill. WRTV Indianapolis and KGTV San Diego partner directly, carrying the icon on their site and being incorporated into the national network of video news. This entitles their citizen journalists to be eligible for a quarterly “best of” news broadcast across member stations and sites.

KMGH Denver and KERO Bakersfield, which already had legacy branded MyReport sections, now use a white label platform without the YouNewsTV brand.

YounewsTV.com has almost 100 local media partners total. One of these is Indian Country Today, which brands its video news (soft news, including poetry) as YourICT.

The setup for local media partners is free; when they sell local sponsorships; YouNews.com receives a flat fee on each sale. There is a standard base rate for the fee, which can be scalable. Best practices include using the video feeds to cover emergency situations - usage shoots up during these events and the site gains more loyal visitors - and to create video contests, especially "cutest baby" and "cutest pet".

To check out one such sponsorship, go to kcrg.com, click on the YouNews widget, and see the Community Bank banner and text ads, along with an additional contest opportunity.

The network also yields a revenue share from a national rep who sells ad networks like MediaSpan across the sites.

Partners with YouNews.com do obtain exclusivity in their market, although differently branded white labels can still be sold to other media, so you could, theoretically, wind up competing with another local media on the same platform (however, the white label partners don’t participate in the quarterly news show)


YouNews.com is created by Broadcast Interactive, whose Co-Founder and CEO Timur Yarnall, co-founded Clickablity with some of his classmates at Stanford University and still holds equity in the company. As business development director for Clickability, he led efforts to secure relationships with CNN, Time Magazine, the Wall Street Journal Interactive and 140 other websites that currently utilize Clickability’s solutions.

Alisa Cromer

The author, Alisa Cromer is publisher of a variety of online media, including LocalMediaInsider and  MediaExecsTech,  developed while on a fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute and which has evolved into a leading marketing company for media technology start-ups. In 2017 she founded Worldstir.com, an online magazine,  to showcases perspectives from around the  world on new topic each month, translated from and to the top five languages in the world.

younews, review, wrtv, kgtv, kmgh, kero, timur yarnell,