Credit: By DBKing on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
Niche topics can be a challenge for traditional broadcast and publishing models.
If the audience for a niche subject is, by definition, relatively small, how can you attract enough attention to a project to justify the time and resources needed to produce it?
Speaking at the Digital Publishing Innovation Summit today in London, Tim Plyming, an executive producer at the BBC, shared some of the methods the outlet is using to engage people in its World War One 'season', designed to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Great War.
"The broadcast model didn't really work [as it's] quite a niche subject matter," said Plyming, adding that when he started the project, the interest surrounding WW1 was "terrifyingly low" because people "thought they already knew about it".
However, the BBC recognised WW1 as "essentially the war that changed everything," said Plyming, and decided to do the biggest season, or content series, it had ever done.
A key objective for the outlet was to engage a new, younger audience, specifically those within the 16-34 age group, and "re-introduce them to World War One," said Plyming.
"But to get young audiences engaged in that the old broadcast model was a massive challenge," he added.
"And actually we did it almost entirely using our digital platforms."
Make content accessible and engaging
The BBC World War One 'season' was launched in January to coincide with the launch of BBC iWonder, a fully responsive platform for stories combining audio, video and text.
Through multimedia stories such as How did 'Pack Up Your Troubles' become the viral hit of WW1? the BBC aimed to produce surprising or interesting articles which would could be consumed within just six or seven minutes.
This time frame is much more appealing for readers who might not have enough of an interest in a subject to commit reading a long article or watching to a 30 minute documentary.
The format of the iWonder pieces – led by well-known presenters such as Dan Snow and Kate Adie and combining different kinds of media – is also designed to be as engaging as possible to attract views and sustain interest.
Think like your audience
The BBC was commissioned to produce 24 short episodes on WW1 for iPlayer, which were then released on YouTube.
To enable these do do well, Plyming said, his team put themselves in the shoes of their target audience and try to create content that would appeal to them.
"We had to think how do you explain how WW1 started to a 16-34 age group?" said Plyming.
The result was a "rap battle" featuring some of the most important figures from the war, which received more than 250,000 views on YouTube.
Find where the audience is already
The BBC teamed up with four universities to offer Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC) around WW1, with lectures being filmed out on location and offered as a three-week course, as some of the target audience were studying the subject already.
"We're just using all of these different ways of finding the audience where they're at, rather than relying on a traditional broadcast model to reach them."
Social media is key
Though Plyming said the BBC was initially hesitant to set up a dedicated Twitter account for its WW1 project because of concerns it would not attract enough followers, the @bbcww1 account is now close to 18,000 followers.
He noted that this community of Twitter followers was a place where the team could "keep a consistent conversation" about topics and issues relevant to the Great War, even as the frequency of BBC coverage of the subject goes through inevitable peaks and troughs.
Related articles
Free daily newsletter
If you like our news and feature articles, you can sign up to receive our free daily (Mon-Fri) email newsletter (mobile friendly).
