The Sun’s Youtube revenues more than doubled in the second half of 2024 and it has “significant” ambitions for video to come.
The Sun is implementing a video strategy based around two pillars: original, episodic formats and breaking news videos.
Director of digital Will Payne, who The Sun more than ten years ago, described the plan as “one of the most ambitious things that I’ve seen in my time at The Sun”.
The Sun’s main Youtube channel hit six million subscribers at the end of 2024 – growth of 33% since Press Gazette’s last ranking of Youtube news accounts in October 2023, making it the biggest UK newspaper publisher on the platform and the second biggest English-language newspaper title overall behind USA Today (7.3 million) – although by all-time views it is ahead (5 billion versus 4.6 billion for USA Today). Since October 2023 The Sun has overtaken The Telegraph, which now has 5.8 million subscribers according to Press Gazette’s new ranking detailing all English-language news publishers with one million-plus subscribers on Youtube.
A higher subscriber count acts as an “indicator of popularity” and can result in Youtube’s algorithm showing your content to more non-subscribers as well, Payne said.
“A lot of people focus in on views, but the value of those views can vary considerably,” he said. “The value of a Youtube short that does 20 million views is quite negligible from a revenue perspective.”
He and his team therefore prefer to look at engagement metrics. “Watch time is the metric we care about more than anything now,” he said.
The Sun’s Youtube watch time in terms of hours was up 40% in July to December compared to the same period in 2023, while its average watch time per video was up 127%, according to Payne who attributed the growth to effort put into improving the content.
Youtube long-form vs Shorts revenues
Youtube revenues for The Sun over the same period were up 129%.
Youtube shares 55% of advertising revenues with creators, keeping 45%. All videos that meet Youtube’s “advertiser-friendly content guidelines” can benefit from pre-roll advertising, while videos of eight minutes or longer show users mid-roll ads.
Payne said: “Obviously the longer you keep someone within your content and the more engaged they are, the more ads you can show them and then that drives up the CPMs [cost per thousand views] and subsequent revenue that we can drive. So engagement is important for a number of reasons, obviously just because we want our consumers to be engaged with our content, but also it enables us to to monetise our content more effectively.”
One of The Sun’s most-watched Youtube videos from the past year:
Youtube Shorts, the platform’s short-form, vertical (smartphone size) format designed to compete with Tiktok and Instagram Reels, gives creators 45% of ad revenue. Its adverts are videos or images that appear between Shorts and can be swiped away instantly by the user.
Payne described the Shorts CPM as “negligible” compared to long videos so it mainly makes money “if something goes absolutely viral”.
He said around 20% of The Sun’s Youtube views are on a TV.
The Sun has put effort into making sure as much of its content can be monetised as possible, for example by making sure videos about the war in Ukraine are not too graphic.
“I think there are a lot of publishers, us included to an extent, who published a lot of content from the Ukraine war in the first iteration of the war. And we’ve really tried to clean up that content and make it a lot more user-friendly and subsequently monetisable,” Payne said.
Sun trialling Youtube memberships
The Sun’s Youtube channel contains a strand led by defence editor Jerome Starkey called Frontline breaking down the biggest news from Ukraine and Russia each week.
Hoping to add an extra way of monetising, The Sun began testing paid Youtube memberships for Frontline just before Christmas. Payne said it was right for the trial because of its loyal audience.
There are three tiers, costing £1.99, £2.99 or £4.99 a month each. Perks include Starkey prioritising replying to members’ comments and extra videos.
Payne said: “I think in a modern digital landscape, you have to be quite nimble and try different things. If you look at influencers, for example, and individuals then they have the ability to utilise Substack and Youtube membership and all these different things. So we’re just looking at all the tools out there that enable us to drive extra revenue streams and obviously recurring revenue streams as well.”
He added that The Sun will try it on some of its other Youtube channels “but some will lend themselves to it, some won’t”.
The Sun has several other channels on the platform: The Sun Sport (321,000 subscribers), Fabulous Magazine (157,000), The Sun Showbiz (55,600), The Sun Health (13,900) and Sun Politics with Harry Cole (2,520 – but “that will be built up”, Payne said).
“The Youtube algorithm is quite specific,” he explained. “It tends to show people exactly what they want. It’s very hard to create a channel which is all things for all people. So it makes sense to create slightly smaller sub-channels that you can develop out and develop different content verticals on.”
Sun video plan: News and Originals
Payne said The Sun has made Youtube, and video in general, “really central to what we do” for the past approximately 18 months, adding that “our ambition for video is really, really significant”.
It is now in the process of creating two video production streams: Originals and News.
Sun Originals is described by Payne as a “top-to-bottom production house, in-house, of highly sponsorable episodic content”. New shows are expected to launch in the coming weeks.
This strand will initially focus on Sun Sport and Fabulous “because they’ve got great brand identity, real audience need, they’re two of our best performing sections, and they’re brand safe so we can create really fun and formats to take out to market”.
The Sun already has regular shows on its Youtube channel including political editor Harry Cole’s Never Mind The Ballots and Royal Exclusive with royal editor Matt Wilkinson, plus football show Tactics Exposed on the Sun Sport channel. The shows also benefit from the state-of-the-art shared News UK studio spaces at their London Bridge headquarters.
Similar to Starkey on Frontline, Payne said showcasing The Sun’s journalists has become increasingly important.
“As much as possible these days, we want to allow readers to have a connection with our journalists. One of the advantages we have is this fantastic access and this ability to go to these places and bring firsthand reportage from the frontline, literally – Jerome went into Russia last year. He’s been over there on several occasions, and I think in a world of high volume, quick turnaround content that still resonates, that kind of reportage, and having that personal connection with a reporter, and we really see that on YouTube particularly.”
Similarly Payne said comments like “thank God you guys are back” after Tactics Exposed’s Christmas break were “really heartening and nice to see people actually forming connections with these Youtube shows where maybe sometimes you feel like the audience is quite transient, it’s just shoved into their feed, and that is the case sometimes, but we are creating a bit more of an appointment to view loyalty with some of these shows, which is really, really positive”.
The other part of the plan is for video in The Sun’s news operation itself, which Payne described as “much more around the contemporaneous bringing our news storytelling to life in video form”.
Most Sun stories now contain a video but not all of these will appear on its Youtube channel.
“Our ultimate ambition is for that main channel to be primarily populated by high-quality shows of a variety of different types. And it could be news shows, they just need to be formatted. So there could be a daily Ukraine show, any number of things, but they just need to be a bit more scheduled and formatted,” Payne said.
He added that the strategy is “one of the most ambitious things that I’ve seen in my time at the sun in terms of this originals function and the news function, which will drive not a video-first transformation, but a real prioritisation of video within the newsroom, and putting it at the heart of the commissioning process.
“That’s one of the things that I’ve said very clearly that I want, is that video shouldn’t be a service department. It shouldn’t be a secondary format. It should be a driving format and a proactive part of the commissioning process…
“I just think that over the weeks and months, you’ll see a real, real significant uptick in the quality of our video content, even though we’re already coming from a solid base. It’s a huge part of our strategy.”
Youtube has ‘mutually beneficial business model’
The Sun is currently undergoing a hiring spree for a “significant increase” in its video team.
On 7 January, eight job adverts were still open: head of news video, head of video distribution, head of video production, video commissioning editors for Sun news video in showbiz, sport and news, and commissioning editors for Fabulous Originals and Sun Sport Originals.
The Sun is still producing videos for other platforms too: on Tiktok, where it has 2.7 million followers, its views were up by 164% in the second half of 2024 according to Payne. Meanwhile the publisher has changed its strategy on Facebook towards video to make up for falling referral traffic. As a result its views were up 818% and revenue was up 1,402%.
But Youtube, Payne said, is “probably the most powerful off-platform video mechanism we have at our disposal in terms of engagement, views and revenue.
“Obviously there’s revenue constraints with regards to Tiktok, even though we consider it to be an important tool in our arsenal, but Youtube is a platform where you can have a significant revenue stream on there by creating high-quality video that we will then also use on our owned and operate and across different socials.”
In addition Payne said Youtube feels like the most sustainable: “The Youtube model is one that obviously there’s a rev share, and we have to give a proportion of our revenue to [Google owner] Alphabet, but it feels like a more sustainable model in so much as when we benefit, they benefit. And obviously it’s all on platform.
“One of the challenges with Facebook, for example, is the way in which we drove the majority of our revenue from them was from referral traffic, and obviously their objective is to keep people on the platform, so the two objectives are contrary to each other, whereas with Youtube, there is a mutually beneficial business model.”
On The Sun’s own website, a video earns more money per view without Youtube’s revenue share but Google’s platform provides an undeniable opportunity for more views and therefore more revenue despite the lower yield.
Payne also noted that although The Sun’s site has “great video integration” it is “still primarily a words and pictures site”.
“We’re doing a lot of tech work around it to change that because we want video to be front and centre of what we do, and it is editorially, but from a product perspective, whilst we’ve got a really good product set up, there’s work to be done to make video a primary asset in a story.”
He pointed to vertical videos now being integrated in The Sun’s app as well as the ability to put featured videos on the homepage. “But it’s not a video-first platform, and I don’t think there is a traditional publisher who could say they are.”
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