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There aren’t many stable careers in media anymore, but by 2014, Ricky Sutton had worked his way up the executive ranks to a point where he was pretty much guaranteed a cushy salary and steady employment for the rest of his life. He got his start in the early 90s as a newspaper journalist in the UK, and over a period of about a decade had managed to leapfrog from covering local news to serving as a war correspondent to holding senior level positions at major media companies.
By 2009, Sutton was running the video division of Fairfax Media, which at the time was one of the largest newspaper holding companies in Australia. He’d reached the upper echelons of the media industry, but then he decided to throw all that away so he could co-launch a bootstrapped startup that paid him absolutely nothing in salary. “That was the least likely career path for someone in my position to take,” he told me. “It would've been so much easier just to stay in the job and earn the salary. But I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't be part of the decline. I had to be part of something else.”
That “decline” Sutton spoke of was that of traditional media. Working on the digital side of these mainstream publications, he’d watched as they struggled to monetize their online audiences, mainly because they were stuck with low-performing display ads as their sole revenue source. Meanwhile, large tech platforms like Google and Facebook were siphoning off a larger and larger share of the advertising market, partly because they controlled the levers of distribution.
As the head of video at Fairfax Media, Sutton knew that video inventory was more valued by advertisers and could be sold at much higher rates. But the problem, as he saw it, was that most publishers weren’t optimized for producing video at scale, and what little they did produce was often uploaded to Facebook and YouTube, the very platforms that had cornered the ad market.
So what was his solution? In 2014, Sutton and two other co-founders — Greg Moore and Ross McCreath — launched Oovvuu, a distribution platform that allowed text-based publishers to embed high-quality video from broadcasters like the BBC. While the going was slow at first — Sutton had to sell his house and went years without a salary — Oovvuu eventually scaled to hundreds of publishers and over 400 million video streams a day. Its stated mission is to “put a relevant video in every article, tell trusted news to a billion people, and repatriate $20B from the tech duopoly back to publishers and broadcasters,” and it claims to increase a single article’s monetization potential by a factor of 16.
So how did a startup with virtually no resources take on some of the largest tech behemoths in the world? In an interview, Sutton walked me through the company’s early days and explained how, publisher by publisher, he slowly convinced an entire industry to band together against a common foe.
Let’s jump into my findings…
Learning the power of distribution
There wasn’t a single lightbulb moment that led to the creation of Oovvuu, but Sutton landed on a key insight in the mid 2000s when he briefly left the traditional media world to fill in for someone’s maternity leave at Microsoft. At the time, the company oversaw a partnership between its MSN portal and an Australian television broadcaster, and Sutton served as an editor of this joint vertical.
It was while in this role that Sutton gained a true understanding of the advantage these large tech companies had over publishers: distribution. By leveraging platforms like Bing, Hotmail, and the MSN portal, Microsoft could unleash tens of millions of users onto any new product or service. For instance, while there he worked on a product that detected surging trends in Bing searches and then served them up to an editorial team that was responsible for creating content around those trends. “We could write a story about it and it would be guaranteed to trend because you were writing the story on a topic people were already interested in,” he said. “It was like dropping a donut into an ants nest.”
The product was called The Fix and scaled up to six million readers in three months, making it the most popular entertainment news site in Australia. This was a level of growth Sutton had never witnessed firsthand before. “It was a real eye-opener to me that you could be a brilliant newser, but if you don't have the distribution, you're going to really struggle. And Microsoft had all the distribution.”
That insight was baked into the launch of Oovvuu. Sutton knew that publishers, collectively, generated billions upon billions of article views each month — he estimates it’s at least 300 billion — and he figured that if he could just get a sizable portion of the publishers to all embed the same video player in each of those articles, then they could all benefit from the combined scale.
The only problem was that the video player needed actual video content to stream through it, which created a chicken-and-egg problem — broadcasters had no incentive to give him video if he didn’t have a distribution network, but at the same time publishers had no incentive to embed his player if it didn’t have any video content.
Luckily, Sutton was able to convince two broadcasters, the BBC and Bloomberg, to license over their content on a revenue sharing basis. Armed with this footage, he began trying to convince publishers to embed Oovvuu’s video. The Murdoch-owned News Corp, a former employer of his, ended up being the company’s first customer. “We had a Brightcove account and so did they” — Brightcove is a platform that allows publishers to publish their own video — “And so we got our Brightcove video player and their Brightcove video player to talk to each other, and so we would press a button and a BBC documentary about a manned mission to Mars would be sent to them and it would appear in their article with their ads. It would make money, we'd all get paid.” To start with, this process was entirely manual, with Oovvuu’s staff chopping up video clips and pairing them with relevant articles.
The product was incredibly rudimentary and required the cobbling together of different tech products, but it worked. Within a few months, News Corp was generating tens of thousands of dollars a month, and it eventually decided to put staff in place whose job it was to embed more videos in articles.
At that point, Sutton had a viable case study of the product working for a well-known news brand, so he set off to find more publishing partners.
Paywall incoming…
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