NDM STORY:

Barcroft Media aims for a killing with videos that grab digital natives:

 summary:

With 68.2m views in March, Barcroft TV was the 40th biggest YouTube channel in the world that month, according to industry site Tubefilter. The channel now has more than 460,000 subscribers and 426m lifetime views. Barcroft Media was founded in 2003 by photojournalist Sam Barcroft,who later launched a sister TV production company. Its YouTube channel was initially purely promotional, aimed at persuading more broadcasters to buy the company's content. By late 2012, the channel was averaging 3m views a month, spurring Barcroft to take it more seriously, producing more original shortform video reports "not as an afterthought", but as an important part of the business. Barcroft TV is now the second most popular news channel in the world on YouTube, while the company also distributes its viral videos to sites like MSN, Yahoo Screen, Dailymotion and Chinese service Youku. Like other online video and/or news companies – Vice, The Young Turks and Upworthy for example – Barcroft Media sees itself as serving a youthful audience neglected by traditional media. "A lot of young people have very important views about issues in the world: that's the demographic of people on their phones, and sharing and commenting and interacting," he says. "They're the native internet generation, but they have been completely abandoned by the mainstream media. Our content is designed for them."

My opinion:

Traditional media is dying out, new and digital media is becoming the new weapon in aiming at the audience and getting their attention.