Three months into the BBC Ideas beta, what have we learned about the product?

We’re now three months into the BBC Ideas beta, and it seems like a good moment to reflect on some of the things we’ve learned in that time. My colleague, BBC Ideas editor Bethan Jinkinson, has written a post about the editorial lessons, so I’m going to focus on the product itself.

First, a reminder of what we were trying to achieve with BBC Ideas. This is what I said when introducing the project back in June 2017:

‘We’ve decided to focus our work on shortform video — that means, for us, pieces which are 2–15 minutes long. We’ll be finding the best content that’s already on bbc.co.uk, and we’ll combine it with great films we’ve found in the archive and new videos made alongside our TV and radio productions. We’ll combine all this content into playlists — collections of shortform videos that are either about a particular concept, or are simply collected by our editors into things designed to be interesting and accessible.’

This is what we’ve built. As Beth says in her piece, one thing that’s come through is that people understand what we’re trying to do editorially. Our completion rates for videos are high, often well over 80%, and by combining videos into playlists we’re seeing people typically watch two videos per visit, suggesting people are happy to continue watching the content.

In other words, when people actually get to watch the content, they like it, and they want more of it.

So that’s where we’re going to focus our efforts in the next phase of the trial. Within BBC Ideas itself, we want to make related videos more prominent, as well as emphasising onward journeys to related content for people who want to delve deeper into the subject they’re watching. That’s going to mean a fairly signifiant amount of work on the video player page. We’ve already improved our Browse functionality since launch, and we want to extend the lessons learned there into our homepage layout.

But the main effort has to be on making our content more discoverable. We’ve had great success with Ideas videos promoted on the BBC homepage and on BBC News, but like all BBC online services we have to find ways of improving discoverability outside those pages. So we’re going to work on:

• Social distribution. We’ve been putting some videos on Facebook and Twitter, and these have seen high views and shares. We want to continue doing that and find more effective ways of driving traffic back to BBC platforms
• Email newsletters — we’ve already seen some success with BBC emails, with high clickthrough rates and positive user responses. We’re going to be doing more here.
• SEO — we continue to tweak our pages to improve SEO, and our clickthroughs from search are climbing steadily
• Continuing to investigate how we can ‘embed’ the BBC Ideas videos in other BBC services, including News, such that the films we are collecting and commissioning get in front of the right audiences

So there’s more to be done between now and the end of the trial. We’ll be updating again during the summer.