Most newsrooms produce more vertical video than they realise. Short explainers for social feeds, clips from interviews, behind-the-scenes moments, quick reactions to breaking news. That video usually lives on platforms the publisher does not control, where it builds someone else’s audience and earns someone else’s revenue.
Your own site is a better home for it. Here is how to make the move work.
Why your social video belongs on your site too
The same clip does different work in different places. On a social platform it can help discovery. On your site it can:
- Keep readers in your experience instead of sending them to an app.
- Lead back to your journalism, because every clip can link to the article behind it.
- Earn revenue you control, through formats and demand you choose.
- Build first-party relationships, since the reader is on your domain, not a platform’s.
None of this requires giving up social distribution. It simply stops treating your own site as the place where video goes to be ignored.
Step 1: Take stock of what you have
Start with an inventory. Many publishers are surprised by how much usable vertical video sits in their social accounts and shared drives. Useful questions:
- Which clips are evergreen, and which were tied to a moment that has passed?
- Which ones already perform well on social, and on which topics?
- Do you have the rights to use every clip on your own site? Licensed footage and music can come with platform-specific terms.
Step 2: Clean up for your own context
Clips made for a social feed often carry platform-specific elements: stickers, calls to follow an account, on-screen text sized for a particular app interface. For your own site:
- Remove prompts that send people off-site.
- Add a clear link or button to the related article.
- Make sure captions are burned in or provided, since most views will start muted.
Step 3: Organise by category, not by date
On social, video lives in a timeline. On your site, it is more useful organised by topic, so a reader on a sports article sees sports clips first and a reader on a food story sees food. Tag clips with the same categories you use for articles and let the feed use them.
Step 4: Choose where readers find it
Video that readers cannot find does not get watched. Common entry points:
- A vertical card in the middle of relevant articles.
- A row of story bubbles on the homepage or section fronts.
- A module at the end of the article, when the reader is deciding what to do next.
We describe these placements on our vertical player page.
Step 5: Fill the gaps
Your social library will not cover every topic or keep up with every day’s news. Two ways to fill it out:
- Short videos generated from your articles. AI tools can turn a story into a short vertical teaser that links back to it, so every article can have a clip.
- Curated editorial video that matches your categories, for days when your own production is light.
Step 6: Measure it like a product
Once the video is live, track open rate, swipe-through depth, watch time and recirculation back to articles. Those numbers tell you which clips and placements are worth investing in, and they make the case for producing more video with your site in mind from the start.
The bigger picture
Publishers spent years building audiences on platforms and then watching the terms change underneath them. Bringing your vertical video home is a practical way to rebalance: keep using social for reach, and use your own site to turn that attention into sessions, relationships and revenue you control. If you want to see what your existing library would look like in a vertical feed on your site, talk to us.
