'We don't rely on Facebook at all:' The Washington Post's year-old experiment with social publishing is moving towards websites, email, and video
- The Lily is The Washington Post's spin-off focused on millennial women, and has increasingly shifted its strategy away from platforms over the past year.
- Page views to its standalone site tripled during the first quarter of this year while email subscribers have increased 177%.
- The site is rolling out its first big video series for Instagram's IGTV and Facebook Watch.
- JPMorgan Chase is re-upping its sponsorship of the site through 2018.
Last spring, the Washington Post created a spin-off brand geared at millennial women called The Lily that promised to primarily distribute content on Facebook, Instagram, and Medium, ini tally ditching its own website for platforms.
That was of course before Facebook's algorithm change sent the media industry into panic and Medium was paying publishers for publishing to its platform before abruptly changing its business model.
So, The Lily broadened its distribution with a stand-alone website (built using the Washington Post's Arc Publishing tools) in February, doubled down on email newsletters and Instagram, and started hosting events like workshops in addition to cranking out social content.
The Lily is also investing in its first big push into video. Earlier this week, The Lily rolled out a series dubbed When Used Correctly, which will focus on commonly asked questions about contraception, and live on Facebook Watch and Instagram's IGTV video hub. The site even created 300 old-school, 22-page zines that sold out online, and is hosting a zine-making class in New York in July.
Suffice to say, the site's initial focus of initially publishing on social platforms has taken many turns over the past year.
While Facebook remains The Lily's biggest traffic driver, the publisher is deliberately not leaning on the platform to build an audience.
"We don't rely on Facebook at all-all these things change so fast," said Amy King, editor-in-chief and creative director of The Lily. "When we launched, the messaging was 'we're doing this for an audience of millennial women' and I think that remains true but we want to reach more than women with these stories."
Since launching:
- The Lily's page views tripled during the first-quarter of 2018 after the website rolled out.
- Email subscribers jumped 177%, making the publication's Lily Lines newsletter The Post's fifth most opened newsletter product.
- Reach across platforms is up 277%.
- The publication's Instagram following has jumped 2500%.
King added that she's interested in "adding unique angles to the news," particularly when it comes to original reporting. A series of essays called The Anxiety Chronicles tells the stories of women with anxiety, for instance, and articles about sexual assaults dive into how it affects the elderly. The eight-person editorial staff also takes existing stories from The Post, repackages them with new art, and distributes them.
Instagram loves custom designs
Instagram is the platform where The Lily has found a strong audience for its design-heavy content.
The Lily creates custom designs for many of its stories with black and white images that include pops of color. There's also a recurring comic series created by artists that are posted to Instagram as slideshows.
The new series When Used Correctly is specifically designed for Instagram's IGTV section and each episode is two to three minutes long. Up until now, King said that video has mostly been used for one-off projects and the series is an example of how "the next step in our journalism is to more in-depth storytelling."
The site borrows resources from The Post
The Lily set up a Medium page for posting content last year, but the publication switched over to its own website earlier this year using The Washington Post's Arc Publishing tools that the paper also licenses out to publications like The Boston Globe. Medium has struggled with its business model and has pulled features like subscriptions for publishers.
"[Medium] was a fast way to get our site up," King said. "What really clicked is when we switched out site to Arc -once we did that, we had flexibility with more extensive analytics."
JPMorgan Chase is The Lily's sole advertiser
The site also pulls in The Post's resources for advertising. JPMorgan Chase was the launch sponsor of the site and has re-upped its involvement to be the exclusive advertiser for 2018. With the shift from social to other distribution channels, WP BrandStudio, The Post's branded content arm, creates sponsored articles that are marked as "content from JPMorgan Chase" on The Lily's website and social platforms.
JPMorgan Chase makes a lot of its own content. In the second year of sponsoring The Lily, The Post will rework some of that content for tone and style and post it on The Lily's channels in addition to continuing to create new pieces of sponsored content.
"We're reimagining their existing content for The Lily and also creating new custom content for them that aligns with current events and speaks to this specific audience," said Annie Granatstein, head of WP BrandStudio. "This is about positioning JPMC as an enabler of women's empowerment and progress so all the pieces that we're doing fit under that wider umbrella."
JPMorgan's most recent piece, for example, is about women of color who work in technology struggling to gain funding and resources.
The Lily's WP BrandStudio team is also experimenting with more video formats like Instagram Stories. Plus, The Post is open to possibly using the same advertising formula that focuses on a single advertiser with other types of content.
"It's an interesting model perhaps for working with advertisers for other verticals that the Washington Post is rolling out so that's something we're looking at as well," Granatstein said.