'Forbes' Partners With Wibbitz To Produce AI-Inspired Video

Forbes has partnered with Wibbitz, an artificial intelligence video creation company, to ramp up its digital video production.

Forbes uses a contributor model on its site, with a network of writers and reporters who publish directly to Forbes.com. Now those contributors — who may have little experience with video — can supplement their online content with video created by Wibbitz’s automated platform.

Wibbitz analyzes text, summarizes it and pulls video from public media and licensed images to create video clips around an article in a few minutes, cutting down on the time and money it usually costs to produce original video.

Wibbitz then takes a share of the video ad revenue publishers make on their sites from the videos.

"Creating premium video offerings is resource intensive, so the text story to video ratio for most digital publishers is far from 1:1," stated Kyle Kramer, VP of video at Forbes Media. "The Wibbitz platform provides a way for great text stories to travel further in the video format than they would in print alone,” he added.

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The partnership means Forbes can produce videos across more verticals on its site and improve user engagement.

Forbes has already launched several mini video series using the technology, such as #IFIONLYKNEW, which focuses on career advice and entrepreneurship.

Wibbitz's video creation platform is automatically formatted for mobile, which accounts for more than 70% of Forbes’ traffic.

Artificial intelligence is gaining popularity in the publishing world. Tronc (formerly Tribune Publishing) chairman Michael Ferro wants to use artificial intelligence to produce 2,000 videos a day

In November, Quartz announced it was creating a new studio to experiment with the use of bots and AI technology in journalism, bolstered by a $240,000 investment from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

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