• by Sara Guaglione , July 29, 2016

President of NewsBeat Social Geoff Campbell doesn’t believe in the business model of publishers past. Instead, he believes his company, which produces one-minute video reports distributed across social media, can be a business funded by its audience and integrated in other publishers’ articles and feeds.

NewsBeat Social has produced more than 30,000 video news reports and ratcheted up over 400 million views globally. Last week, the company announced that it qualified for its filing of a Regulation A+ IPO and will begin accepting investments in its common stock at a price of $5.00 per share.

NewsBeat Social has attracted over 20,000 potential investors, mostly made up of their audience.

Campbell spoke to Publishers Daily about how his company is creating a business model that correlates with the way millennials consume news.

How is NewsBeat Social different from other video news providers?

We separate the reporting from the analysis of a news story. We include the what, when, who and where — without the why. We report over 50 videos a day, across a team of 21 journalists.

How does this affect your distribution of the videos?

We try to bring the news to where you are. If you happen to be on Facebook, we want to bring the news to your social experience. The vast majority of our distribution is where our target audience of millennials are: on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

We want other news organizations to consider our videos a complement to what they do, especially if they do the analysis or opinion to our report.

For example, Huffington Post would embed one of your videos from YouTube into an article?

That’s another channel beyond social, to provide other organizations with a video asset to help them generate higher CPMs and engagement. In the future, we want to professionalize that with syndication so online journalism can have our video product.

What are some of the challenges publishers are facing?

News needs to be where people want it, and we should be trying to get people to come to their platforms of choice. The shift to mobile-delivered news has broad implications to our business model.

Can you tell me more about your company’s IPO?

Most companies underestimate the amount of marketing that needs to go into securing investors to an IPO. We already have a massive audience, which we can convert into investors. They are the people who will buy our apps, share our news on social media. This also maintains our independence as a news organization.

If we are successful we will likely be one of the first to list on NASDAQ under this kind of IPO process.

Why aren’t you a fan of sponsored content?

If news is intermixed with a commercial from a brand that has paid us to do a news report, that breaks the brand promise of what we are trying to do with our news. It erodes [audience’s] trust in a news brand.

If you run a promo for Pepsi in the middle of an entertainment story, that’s different, but with TheNew York Times, which audiences expect to be a standard for information to be unbiased and truthful, a promotion from Shell oil erodes their trust.

It’s not a practice that we employ, because we believe that it goes against what we offer consumers. We run ads at such low cost we don’t have to do those types. We do video commercials ads and pre-roll ads.

What do you think is the future of advertising?

In general, this idea of bringing audience to a Web property to consume news and sell ads is going the way of the dodo in the future. The future is less about selling your audience and more about creating great news and using that to bring the right audience to the right brand.

What are your thoughts about Facebook’s new algorithm favoring content from friends and family over content from publishers?

We have a business where we publish in Facebook, we do not drive product off the platform. Our commerce model is about paying Facebook. Digitally native competitors use Facebook to drive traffic back to their sites, but we don’t do native, we don’t take money from sponsors. News companies like ours are very much aligned with what Facebook is doing with their platforms, and ours is consistent with their business objectives.