Facebook-Friendly News Publisher NowThis Wants To Make Long-Form Content

NowThis is going long. A recent report from Digiday details the news video company’s plan to hire a new team that will create long-form content to complement the short-form clips for which NowThis is already known.

NowThis is best known for its success on Facebook, where its main hub has more than 10 million followers. The brand owes much of its success to the short, snackable nature of its clips, which have performed well within Facebook’s algorithm. Now that Facebook has tweaked its algorithm to promote long-form content, however, NowThis is following the tide. The publisher’s future plans include a crop of three-to-five minute videos that will resemble its existing 60-second clips in terms of subject matter (it is not controversial to say that NowThis tends to lean left), but with more depth.

To produce these longer pieces, NowThis has hired execs

from places like The Huffington Post and MTV, all of whom will support its expanding editorial operation. The publisher will continue to experiment with non-news programming as well; last October, we reported on its web series Trumpocalypse, which it engineered alongside the digital studio Astronauts Wanted.

“We’re not moving away from what we know,” NowThis president Athan Stephanopoulos told Digiday. “This is an opportunity for us to extend and amplify the NowThis brand by going deeper into longer-form programming around key issues and topics that do well in the social feed.”

As it maintains its strong relationship with Facebook, NowThis could also show up on other platforms, where it could explore half-hour or hour-long formats. Stephanopoulos mentioned Verizon’s Go90, Comcast’s Watchable, Netflix, and Amazon as potential partners for his company.