Lifestyle publisher Stylist quits IGTV in favor of Apple News

Lifestyle publisher Stylist quits IGTV in favor of Apple News

After nearly two months of posting to IGTV, Instagram’s longer-form video hub, female-focused publisher Stylist is pulling back from the platform to focus its efforts on Apple News, which has a more proven monetization model.

Stylist began posting to IGTV when it launched at the end of June. Since then, it has published seven videos under three minutes each with views rarely scaling 5,000. According to Owen Wyatt, managing director at parent company Shortlist Media, this is 5 percent of the views it gets on the platform’s more low-fi video hub, Instagram Stories.

“IGTV has been a similar process to every new video product development from Facebook and Instagram: Built without consideration of a revenue share ad model,” said Wyatt. “I can’t be the only managing director getting tired of trialing products without a proper revenue share behind them. That’s why last week I pulled resource out of IGTV.” Instead, that resource is being directed to Instagram Stories — which delivers referral traffic — and Apple News.

Apple News, where Stylist gets video views in the hundreds of thousands, which it monetizes through pre-roll, according to Wyatt, is the title’s highest platform referral traffic driver. Direct traffic and SEO are the top traffic sources. Each quarter, the publisher sits down with editorial and commercial leads from Apple News to discuss where the platform’s product updates align with the publisher’s editorial focus.