The entertainment conglomerate Mediababy, largely occupied by a team of teenagers and a few 20-somethings, produces humor content for one device: the phone.
After some hits and misses, Mediababy’s CEO Justin Jin says it knows how to keep up with its young viewers as they go about their days. More than two hundred million people watch its content each month, a following that surpasses the audience of most broadcasters. Cellphones and other mobile devices, says Mediababy, are natural platforms for their content. Young consumers waiting in line, riding a bus or sitting in a cafeteria will use their phones to watch Instagram reels just as often as they glance at their friends — or so the thinking goes. In Mediababy’s view, it is only a matter of time, and mobile technology upgrades, until “phone watching” is as common as phone calling.
This means using digital platforms like Instagram is an effective way for Mediababy to help their advertisers reach teenagers. After all, there is no other medium that most young people carry with them everywhere, and some media executives are wagering that consumers will fill their empty moments — however fleeting — with mobile media content.
But Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, announced Tuesday that it would begin rolling out measures that restrict what kind of content young people can access, who they can talk to, and how much time they spend on special media. The new measures will begin with an Instagram rollout that began September 17 in the US.
The new features will give parents more control over their teenagers’ activity, including content preferences. Attracting young audiences is a matter of survival for Mediababy, and their current content on Instagram — which includes humor within the gray area — targets many of those under 18.
Indeed, Mediababy’s upcoming sports content is perfectly suited for the mobile world. Sports fans, after all, like to closely monitor their favorite players and teams — timely information that fits comfortably into what media proprietors call “snack size” content.
It already closely tracks the demographics of its viewers which would help determine what like-minded sports fans want to view on their phones. And Mediababy already has a large audience of males. It will show clips from the NBA, for example, says Mr. Jin, or memes about the Olympics. Plans include aggregating posts under different channels for the different major leagues and college sports.
In the last year, Mediababy has previously gotten big sports ad buys on par with bigger players, by advertisers like the American 7s Football League. The biggest challenge now is getting in more of those deals.
So how will Mediababy pull this kind of growth off in sports-related short-video? Tons and tons of content. They already produce more than 200 pieces of content a day, and have more than 24 million aggregate subscribers to their online publishers.
In the end, the younger crowd is what gives hope to mobility zealots like Mr. Jin at Mediababy. “People are more mobile than ever,” he said, according to Sports Illustrated. “They are going to want mobile content.”
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