Talking TV: Ticker News Chases A Purely FAST News Model

Ticker News may very well be the only purely FAST channel iterating news network in the world. The Melbourne, Australia-based outfit, runs on the leanest side of lean, staffing- and resource-wise, but frames itself as a global network with an emphasis on context and analysis in its offerings.

The four-year-old company says it has now picked up 3.2 million monthly viewers and is continuously adding new distribution outlets to its arsenal.

In this Talking TV conversation, CEO Ahron Young, who does double duty as the network’s primary anchor, explains why FAST was the, er, fastest way to market, how his growth trajectory is squarely targeted at the U.S. and how native advertising has been his most promising revenue driver.

Episode transcript below, edited for clarity.

Michael Depp: Ticker News bills itself as the world’s first native FAST channel news network. The Melbourne, Australia-based company has been around for four years and says it has a global viewership of 3.2 million monthly.

Ticker News produces between three and nine hours of daily news programing, along with two weekly, 15-minute mini-documentaries from its micro bureaus, one of which is now located in New York. The organization is presently trying to make inroads in the U.S. and broaden the array of FAST channel options on which it iterates. It hopes that its take leaning into context and analysis on major global stories and its younger-leaning target demographic will help gain it momentum on these shores.

I’m Michael Depp, editor of TVNewsCheck, and this is Talking TV. Today, a conversation with Ahron Young, CEO of Ticker News, about its unusual platform strategy and its content value proposition. We’ll be right back.

Welcome, Ahron Young.

Ahron Young: Hi, Michael. Thank you so much for having us.

Aaron, why the name Ticker News? Is this a reference to a news ticker kind of on the bottom of the screen?

I think so. But also, I love the idea of news with heart. I had been working for a corporation, and I think like so many of us in the news industry, we’ve been watching what’s been happening over the last probably 10 years. You know, I often say to people, you know, where did the idea of Ticker come from? They’ll ask me, and I often point to your website, would you believe, because as an avid viewer from all the way over here in Australia for probably the last 10 or so years, ever since I discovered that you guys existed, you know, it’s been a regular digest of ongoing change in the industry in so many ways and not always great ways, right? And as a journalist, it felt like it was time to put my money where my mouth was.

Why is Ticker News a FAST-first news organization?

We were first FAST before we knew what FAST was. To be honest, when you look back to mid-2019, it wasn’t exactly a four-letter word that people were talking about. We were definitely in the linear game, and we were in streaming. Streaming was exciting, not just because of Netflix and some of, you know, all the things that were happening in 2019. But for the first time you didn’t have to have a satellite in the sky or a huge antenna on top of a building to be a broadcaster.

We were in a world of niches, and so we found ourselves in a place. And as we continued to speak to different platforms and partners around the world, the word FAST started to come together and we went, we’re actually a FAST channel before we actually even knew we were one.

And where can viewers find Ticker News currently?

I’m in Melbourne, Australia. I’ve lived here for most of my life, aside from a year in Russia and another year in the U.K. when I was younger, would you believe. And that meant that, you know, my love for Australia was fantastic, but I call it the Olivia Newton-John strategy, which is if you want to make it big here, you’ve got to make it big overseas first. And so that kind of belief in what we were doing was truly unique for platforms, and it didn’t have to be something that was trapped in a geographical area.

We see our audience as almost stateless. They are international citizens. They travel a lot. So, we had to be in as many places as possible. To answer your question, right across Europe, in the United States, obviously here in Australia, throughout Asia, on different platforms, I could go through naming them all there on our website, obviously. But the big platforms like Samsung TV Plus, Fubo, we’re about to join Sling in the United States. We have ongoing conversations in Australia, and we just continually add different platforms.

Now, many TV news operations and even some newspapers and digitally native news organizations are launching FAST channels, but they’re doing so in more of an ancillary way. They’re a companion to the iterations that they already have on numerous other platforms, and most look at FAST channels as more of a passive, smaller revenue stream that draws most of that revenue from programmatic ads. Is that the case with Ticker?

No, we kind of look at it the opposite way around, actually. So, these companies, I’m aware of them. It feels like every day a new one launches and you kind of have to keep looking at the business plan saying we’re going to be OK, right. And I think that that has been in our DNA is that we were designed not to be an old-fashioned company dipping our toe in to different things. There are big media companies still relying on cable who can have the money to just try things. Let’s throw everything at Snapchat or Instagram and, that didn’t work. Didn’t make any money, hey, it’s OK.

Our view is you have to be in everything, but you have to keep your cost base low and working in FAST and being a FAST-first channel means that there is plenty of scope. Our audience continues to grow between 10 and 20% month on month, which is the numbers we get from these FAST platforms.

But in terms of revenue, we know it’s going to be a slow burn to rely on FAST. But what are the choices there? I mean, look what’s happening to cable, look what’s happening to traditional advertising. For us, essentially, it’s preparing us for a future where there will be a lot of players and the way to survive is to stay pretty slim.

Are you relying wholly on programmatic right now or the is the advertising direct sold?

Gosh, if we were reliant on programmatic right now, I probably wouldn’t be able to afford this shirt. We’ve from the very beginning had to make sure that we had a really diversified revenue stream because when we started, as I say, programmatic was a dream that it would even happen. Getting on platforms, you know, it was like, you have a choice. I remember speaking to someone who was looking to invest in Ticker in the very beginning, and she said to me, you know, Ahron, we don’t invest in media businesses that rely on advertising or subscription. And I said, honey, what else is there? And she said, honey, you tell me. So, I jumped on my bike and said, I’m not going to start this business until we can come up with a different revenue stream, a different way of finding ways to make money.

And the first thing that really happened was on Day One, I had about a thousand emails from different PR pitches saying, We really want to get our clients out there. And we had a lot of interviews in those first few weeks. And what we realized is that they all wanted access to those interview clips to be able to put it on their LinkedIn, to put it on all their different platforms and things. And that was it. That was part of our business strategy, was to be, I suppose, the home of business from around the world, trying to tell the world what they do and also to, I suppose, elevate themselves to be full leaders in that. That’s part of our commercial.

Just to clarify, you’re basically describing video native advertising then.

Yeah, exactly. So, people who come on, tell me about your business. Tell me about the industry that you’re in. What are you seeing is as a change, be a thought leader, etc. That’s probably about 5% of our on-air programing, far less than traditional advertising, but it pays a lot more than programmatic.

Since you’re spread out across the world, at least for your viewership, who’s doing the selling? Are you just working with outside contractors in strategic locations? I mean, you know, the world is a big place…

We have we have a bunch of different sales teams in different countries. Sometimes they compete against each other to sell Ticker to different platforms and to different advertisers. We have our own home-based sales team as well here in Melbourne that deals with different companies where we do kind of co-branded programing.

It’s very obvious to the viewer, but we might talk about, for example, going to show funding futures about people who are young, who are looking to invest. What’s the best way to go, etc. We want it to be very editorial. It just happens to be sponsored by a company. But again, that isn’t the huge way of making money in this world. You’ve got to balance, as you know, viewers who want to watch with advertisers, who want everything. And if you give the advertisers everything, you can lose your viewers. So, you’ve got to make sure that you get the balance right. We’ve spent a lot of time getting there.

How does that revenue pie break down, say programmatic versus native versus or is native, I suppose the only kind of direct sold or do you also direct sell just conventional advertising?

We’ve looked at heaps of different ways. So, obviously when you’re running a small media business which is growing, you’re trying to find different ways to, you know, anything, right? And you know that programmatic will work, but that’s all based on volume. It can be really hard to be able to give the advertisers the exact numbers the exact day that they need them. That’s been the biggest issue with the FAST industry.

You know, I was at a conference in Las Vegas where another FAST person said, can you tell me how many women over 35 are watching my channel in the three biggest markets? Because no one seems to be able to tell me that that’s an ongoing issue for the industry. For us, we’re able to break it down thanks to our EDMs, thanks to a lot of the research we do about our audience as well to work out who are they, where are they, how are they watching and how long are they watching for? And to be able to give that to our advertisers, too.

All right. That’s the business. So, let’s look at the journalism product.

My favorite part, by the way.

All of our favorite parts in some ways. You’ve got about eight reporters, I’ve been told, fanned out across these micro bureaus across the world. It’s a big world, and that’s not a lot of people. So, how do you use these journalists in a way that creates value for viewers?

Well, because we don’t just rely on our journalists. You know, we’ve had reporters in Singapore, we’ve had people in Paris and in London and we’ve had reporters that we’ve paid to travel into Kiev. We’ve had reporters who have been, you know, as you mentioned, we’ve got an anchor who’s in New York hosting a daily program. We also work with a whole bunch of other places, too. I’m speaking as a journalist, just relying on getting your news through the old-fashioned ways of journalists and politicians and policemen. There are so many citizen journalists out there these days that you can rely on during that breaking news.

The fact is, is that we didn’t want to just be a breaking news channel. We worked out very quickly, as you just said, that there’s plenty of people doing that. There’s CNN. There’s all these fantastic legacy broadcasters with so much history that there is no point launching a company to try and compete with them.

What we try to do is actually add conversation and context to what’s happening. There’s so much assumed knowledge in journalism that people know what we’re talking about when we go on air. So, we actually decided to bring in all these different programs. I host a bunch of shows. In America, Today‘s hosted by Veronica Dedeaux out of New York. You know, she’s ex-CNN and NBC and worked for a bunch of different places. What we worked out was that if we interviewed people about these topics into a bit more detail, kind of like The Economist magazine, for example, it’s not exactly news of right now. It’s talking about giving context to events happening.

And that is something that I think you can do with three people, so long as they’re really good. You can do it with many people or as few people. Right now, we’re seeing redundancies happening right across the media landscape. It’s safe to say that a huge team is going to be with legacy, but it seems to be a world of pain there.

Well, let’s just kind of drill into that value proposition a little bit further then, because if that proposition is to bring context and analysis, of course, a lot of other news organizations have plenty of that, too. CNN has, God knows, loads of analysis, as does Fox News, MSNBC, and for that matter, local news often has elements of context or analysis. So, what’s different about how that plays out at Ticker News? Can you give me an example and drill into something specific about how your particular brand of analytical discussion or contextualization might look?

Well, I think for one, it’s about being multi-platform, right? So, you’ve got the journalism side, which I’ll talk about in a minute. This morning, I had four interviews with four different people, about eight different topics that we that are news at the moment. So, from today, the big story was Hunter Biden, obviously the submarine which has been missing, and trying to work out the story from the business angle or from the tech angle of what’s been happening.

We don’t cover general news the way that perhaps CNN does. We focus on the business side or the political side or the tech side, depending on what angle we can actually bring to the story. We don’t want our website to look exactly the same as everybody else because we don’t want to be adding another voice just for the sake of it. We want to actually look at a different side to the story.

For example, we have a look at the submarine that’s happened, and I know that this is being shown a bit later. We don’t right now know what’s happened to that submarine. But the traditional way is to have a reporter in Boston to be going live on the hour, saying the same thing all the time, waiting for something to come through. I see that from the business side as probably a bit inefficient the way that things are today and actually have a team of experts that we can call upon at any time when that is happening.

That is something that we can do. And to put it out really quickly in as many different places as possible. And we obviously want to increase our original reporting, which is why we have documentaries. So, we will have a full show about a topic which will be backed up by a documentary that our team turns around within a couple of days. So, the submarine, you know, it’s kind of like that hive belief of throwing absolutely everything at it as it’s happening.

These are twice weekly, 15-minute or so documentaries, typically?

Yeah. And it’s basically to give a bit more context to something that we find interesting. Our viewers love Elon Musk. Our viewers love Richard Branson. Our viewers, you know, 25 to 45, predominantly male. They might work for one of the big four consultancy firms. They might work for a big bank or an airline. They love aviation. And so, they’re kind of looking for things that can sit on YouTube, considers a podcast, can sit on our website and be on our FAST network as well. And I think that’s the key point. You know, everything that goes on our FAST platform is also being repurposed at the exact same time. It goes on YouTube, the same time that it goes on the FAST network. We don’t prioritize the television side more than we do any other part.

So, on a documentary, let’s say Elon Musk, I mean, there is loads of content about Elon Musk. In 15 minutes, just with this one example, what are you going to do with that? Are you going to sort of diving into one element, recency with Twitter, for instance? How do you make a 15-minute documentary about a massive subject be effective?

Well, we can have a bit of fun with it. We did our first documentary, we got about five on Elon Musk that we’ve put together over the past couple of months. But the first one was called Billionaire Blowups, and it was about billionaires. Elizabeth Holmes was one of them. Kanye West was another, but Elon Musk led it and it was kind of about how he’s got the power and the money to be able to go bang, I’m going to just do something like buy Twitter and just see what happens and rockets because hey, I can do that.

Now, what happens to that documentary? It doesn’t just go on our platforms, but the platforms that I mentioned, for example, Samsung TV across Europe, they actually highlight that because it’s in the news. So, while everybody else might have a news story that is going with that, we have our documentary sitting right there. Not only do we have our news interviews about what might be happening that day, but we have the documentary sitting there. And also, when we have a big story about Elon Musk, and he quite often leads our programing because, as I say, it’s something that people are talking about, we make sure the documentaries are actually attached in our programing.

The strategy for the FAST channel then allows people to watch that first 15 minutes about what’s happened today and the second 15 minutes straight away from those documentaries as well.

What are you hoping to be the business trajectory here?

Yeah, it’s a good point. I think that we want to be the safe place for FAST channels, right? So, I think that over the past few years, maybe longer than that, maybe 10, 15 years, a lot of news networks have kind of shifted left or shifted right. They’ve had to find a niche, but the niche has been politics. My view is there is a huge group of people who don’t watch those sorts of networks because they’re not really that political. They don’t mind politics, but it doesn’t make them angry. It doesn’t have a side. What they have is a keen interest in world events. What they have is an interest in technology and business and we want to be the place for them.

So, we’re not trying to be like a NewsNation, trying to find a place between CNN, etc. We don’t really look at that. We love that. I find that interesting as journalists. But I think that from the business side of what we need to do, we need to provide an alternative, and that is for people who are flicking through and watching a political interview and saying it’s not quite for me moving on to something else and finding maybe a documentary or finding an interview with someone who can break down what’s happening with the Fed Reserve at the moment when interest rates are going to change.

We’re talking to an audience that is looking to buy a house, you know, so many of the news conversations happening in newsrooms these days is our audience is old, they already own the house. They’re not worried about paying their mortgage. They’re worried about their superannuation, as we call it here in Australia. Their 401k.

So, I think that making sure that we appeal to a younger audience that has all the devices, has the TV in the lounge room, the iPhone or whatever it might be in their hand, and they’re consuming media in different ways. We want to try to be in as many places as possible as quickly as we can.

And are you looking to staff up, widen the coverage net or deepen what you’re already doing?

I call this a bit of the AUKUS network. AUKUS is the alliance between Australia, the U.K. and the U.S., which was announced a couple of years ago from a military standpoint. We love the United States. That’s why we built our first actual anchoring studio from there with Veronica. We’re looking at the U.K. As well. Thankfully, the time zones make it really easy, but we also had to be able to program news for people watching at a certain time of day. So, in America, Today can be broadcast in primetime. We have Australian content when America is asleep, for example, and British content in the late afternoon Australia time as the U.K. is starting to wake up when the United States is asleep. So, we program out our hours based on where people are. Yeah, we want to open in the U.K. We definitely want to staff up across the United States. We love the U.S. Obviously, so many stories that happen there are of interest to the very people that we’re looking at around the world.

And from a distribution standpoint, is it your goal to just stay in the FAST lane? I can’t believe I just said that horrible pun.

I’m going to put that in my pitch deck, that’s fantastic.

I’m kicking myself for that. But are you going to stay there or do you want… I know you have a website as well. You can watch it there. But do you aim to have a more conventional OTT channel with VOD options? What’s the play there?

You probably can’t see behind me. But yeah, we’ve got Apple TV. We’ve got, you know, anywhere that there is a place to put an app. You know, we’ve been working with Comcast, NBC on apps for them. I think it has launched. I keep asking our team, has it launched yet? But you know what these things are like, everything takes time. Our view is that we just want to be where eyeballs are. And if they’ll take us, we’d be happy to be on.

Our aim is to provide news that is happening at the moment to as many people in a different format. We don’t have billionaire backers, but we do believe in a really good story. And I think that storytelling means everything to a viewer who doesn’t have much time. And that’s basically how we want to go. Whether it’s traditional cable show, whether it’s FAST.

But we found a great home in FAST. I think that the way that we’re seeing connected TVs continue to grow, the way we’re seeing more viewers shifting across, looking for particularly as we’re on the cusp of recession, as we’re seeing more viewers making their way across to other options. We’ve found a sustainable business model. We just want you to watch.

I’m kind of picking up some resonances of Cheddar News here, when looking for a closest correlate from what your ambitions seem to be. 

It’s interesting you say that. So, I was aware of Cheddar back four years ago when I started Ticker. The lessons from Cheddar are fantastic for us because they are always going to be four years ahead of where we are. I know quite a few people at Cheddar, quite a few people have worked for Cheddar, and I hold them up the same way that I hold up a CNN or an NBC.

But I think the point is, is that, you know, what Jon Sternberg did was absolutely fantastic. It was kind of the first thing, the first time that a Cheddar had been launched, a streaming news network. What it taught me was you could be an independent news network and really make a go at it. The difference is we don’t have our studios on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Markets isn’t in my DNA. News, world news, is in my DNA. So, I think that a bit like how KFC and McDonald’s are both fast food chains, you can be on the same street, but we certainly sell different things.

Right. Different kinds of chicken. OK. Well, Ahron Young, it is a very interesting model. Thanks for being here today to talk about it.

Thanks so much for your time, Michael.

Talking TV is back most Fridays with a new episode and all of the episodes are on TVNewsCheck.com and on our YouTube channel. We’ve also got an audio version in all of the places you find podcasts if straight up listening is more your thing. Thank you for watching and listening to this one. See you next time.