{"id":313626,"date":"2025-11-25T22:58:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-25T22:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/313626\/"},"modified":"2025-11-25T22:58:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-25T22:58:09","slug":"news-publishers-embrace-vertical-video-with-in-app-watch-tabs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/313626\/","title":{"rendered":"News publishers embrace vertical video with in-app \u201cwatch\u201d tabs"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s the end of 2025 and vertical video is here to stay.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Right around this time last year, I talked to several news publishers launching vertical video<\/a> on their own platforms. They started out experimenting with vertical video on social, saw high engagement there, and wanted to bring that engagement to their own sites.
\n\"\"<\/a>Nearly three-quarters of Americans watch news videos online and most of them (61%) use social media or YouTube to do so<\/a>. This year, The Economist, Newsday, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN all launched dedicated tabs for video viewing in their apps, to try to keep some of those users on their own sites.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we are seeing a migration of our existing audience over to a new format, we still want them to get information from Newsday,\u201d TC McCarthy<\/a>, Newsday\u2019s VP of digital development, told me. \u201cWe do this job because it\u2019s important to have an informed populace. So let\u2019s try to be where they are.\u201d<\/p>\n

The New York Times\u2019 Watch tab begins autoplaying video as soon as you tap it. The Economist lets users toggle between short vertical videos and Insider, the magazine\u2019s recently launched, twice-weekly, horizontal discussion show. Newsday\u2019s TV tab leads with live news programming filmed in its studio, followed by topic-based video carousels. Newsday and The New York Times both include the corresponding story link with every video.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t the infamous \u201cpivot to video\u201d of the 2010s<\/a>, when publishers rushed to create Facebook news video teams, only to find nobody was watching. The publications I spoke to for this story are doubling down on news video on their own platforms, while also publishing vertical video to social media.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe always want to make sure that we\u2019re catering to all of our audience, and we don\u2019t want to make them try all these different places to get the news the way they want to get it,\u201d McCarthy said.<\/p>\n

Everyone\u2019s watching vertical video now
\n\"\"<\/a>Newsday integrated vertical video into its app in August, said Emilio Guerra<\/a>, Newsday\u2019s VP of digital content. Around 30% of users open it nearly every day. Most of Newday\u2019s videos come in horizontal and vertical versions. About a third of the videos viewed across Newsday\u2019s sites are vertical, Guerra said, and 25% of its vertical video views come from desktop devices, even though its overall traffic from desktop is less than 20%.
\n\"\"<\/p>\n

Newsday\u2019s TV tab<\/p>\n

The Economist launched a dedicated video tab in its app in March. In-app video viewing is only available to paid subscribers, and vertical video consumption across the app \u2014 including in the tab \u2014 has more than doubled in the last year, head of video Liv Moloney<\/a> told me.<\/p>\n

Moloney pointed to a recent Economist piece<\/a> about how older people\u2019s screen time has skyrocketed. \u201cThe idea that it\u2019s just young people [watching vertical video] is a bit misleading,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is very anecdotal, but my dad sends me many more Instagram Reels than he did a few years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just media, no social<\/p>\n

While publishers\u2019 video tabs and vertical videos are obviously inspired by social media, they generally don\u2019t include social features like comments and likes. And they\u2019re not powered by algorithms; if two different people open the tabs, they\u2019ll see the same thing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to start with a basic experience that had the things we felt were most important,\u201d said Solana Pyne<\/a>, video director at The New York Times. \u201cWe\u2019re not trying to be TikTok. Their primary goal is not to communicate information. It\u2019s pure engagement.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that the Times would never consider adding more social features to its videos, she said. \u201cBut what we wanted to see first was: What does it feel like to curate our distinctive journalism and get a sense for how our audience is engaging with it?\u201d<\/p>\n

Times editors curate all the videos you see in the Watch tab, choosing them from sections like news, opinion, The Athletic, Wirecutter, and Cooking.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur initial theory is people are coming to us for news, so we start with the urgent [stories], then our investigations, and then weave in a mix of coverage from across the entire company,\u201d Pyne said. \u201cWe want to be able to catch you up at the top and give you an opportunity to explore the breadth of the videos that we\u2019re making, and right now it feels like a really satisfying experience.\u201d Personalization may come in the future, but there are no concrete plans for it yet.<\/p>\n

The Economist and Newsday have carousels for different sections, and users can scroll through \u201cplaylists\u201d of just news, sports, business, or lifestyle videos. \u201cThe Feed Me section doesn\u2019t have crime stories, and vice versa,\u201d Newsday\u2019s McCarthy said. \u201cThe people who are best equipped and knowledgeable about the audiences for those sections are making regular decisions about what to put in a carousel and when. So far the [internal] discussion has been that people are doing this much better than an algorithm could right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

The publishers I spoke with haven\u2019t enabled comments on vertical videos yet, in part because moderating comments is a lot of work. The Economist\u2019s Moloney said that while having that kind of engagement can be great for building community, it\u2019s not the publication\u2019s best use of resources right now.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Economist\u2019s Shorts tab<\/p>\n

McCarthy said he sees a case for adding some sort of \u201cliking\u201d feature to vertical videos in Newsday\u2019s app, but the company needs to gauge the audience\u2019s reaction to the current iteration of the tab first. \u201c[Adding] he social features and then [backing] them with an algorithm is substantial tech investment,\u201d McCarthy said. \u201c[Doing] that from the outset wouldn\u2019t make a lot of sense if the feature itself wasn\u2019t getting a good response.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ad-free\u2026for now<\/p>\n

While The Economist\u2019s entire app is only for subscribers, The New York Times and Newsday let users watch videos in their tabs without subscriptions. And the videos are free on social media.<\/p>\n

Instagram hits me with an ad after I scroll through eight Reels. TikTok and Facebook Reels do so after three. Publishers know there\u2019s money to be made from vertical video, and while none of the three video tabs currently have ads, that\u2019s likely to change \u2014 at least at The New York Times \u2014 in the next few months.<\/p>\n

The New York Times\u2019 advertising department has been scaling up its own vertical video capabilities to match the newsroom\u2019s increased output, said Joy Robins, the Times\u2019 global chief advertising officer.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Watch tab is an exciting new placement for advertisers that adds a significant pillar to our full suite of video advertising offerings,\u201d she told me in a statement. \u201cAvailable for brands as part of an open beta test for vertical video advertising by early 2026, this new placement will offer brands a way to create video ads with speed and simplicity, making it easier than ever to get started and optimize campaigns.\u201d<\/p>\n

Newsday, meanwhile, is in the early stages of discussing Watch tab advertising. McCarthy said that for now, Newsday is \u201ctrying to make the video experience as uninterrupted as possible.\u201d But advertisers are already familiar with the format and style, Guerra said, so it shouldn\u2019t be a hard sell when the time comes.<\/p>\n

The Economist\u2019s video tab is part of its general strategy to make its subscription as enticing as possible. About two-thirds of the Economist Group\u2019s revenue comes from subscriptions, with the remaining third comes from advertising. In June, Economist president Luke Bradley-Jones told me that the app had more than 270 million active visits<\/a> for the year ending in March, up from 239 million the previous year, and that 85% of new subscribers were digital-only.<\/p>\n

\u201cBreadth of consumption is really important for subscribers to renew their subscription,\u201d Moloney said. \u201cWithin the top-performing videos is the breadth of topics, like economics, geopolitics, fun videos, book recommendations. You can rarely see the same [topics]. It really is like another version of The Economist, but in a new form, which I think is really reassuring.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s the end of 2025 and vertical video is here to stay. Right around this time last year,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":313627,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[165,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-313626","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mobile","8":"tag-mobile","9":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313626\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/313627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}