Starting August 3rd, Netflix is opening its library to digital media publishers. BuzzFeed, Condé Nast, Hearst, People Inc, and Tastemade are all onboard. The deal covers licensed past videos and new ongoing series that would’ve typically lived on YouTube.
Think Architectural Digest’s “Open Door” or Vanity Fair’s “Lie Detector Test.” That kind of stuff. Videos will run 3 to 20 minutes and cover food, travel, fashion, entertainment, design, and wellness.
Netflix’s pitch: subscribers can watch content “from around the Internet without having to leave Netflix.” It’s a direct response to the viewership slump they’ve been seeing — some shows lose up to 70 percent of their audience by season two.
The move makes sense if you look at what’s happening with attention spans. TikTok and YouTube are eating everyone’s lunch. Short-form content is cheap to license compared to original programming. Netflix gets to fill gaps in its library without spending studio-level money.
Will this actually get people to stick around? Debatable. But it’s a low-risk experiment. And Netflix says more partners could be added down the line.
