Future plc (FUTR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to the FourFour Two webinars. This time, we're shining a spotlight on Future Studios, the center of excellence at Future that was formed from the acquisition of Barcroft Studios in 2019 and the original Future video team. We wanted to focus on Future Studios. As joined in recent series of investor meetings, we've had a lot of questions about social platforms and also video monetization. This part of our business sits at the center of this. Future Studios is at the heart of our strategy and a great example of our improving earnings today and growing strategically new revenues in the future. The team is going to take you through this in more detail. However, quickly, Future Studios delivers on strategy for us in 2 distinct ways. Firstly, diversifying our revenue streams. We're evolving our digital ads model, ensuring we are able to achieve the best yields and monetize our growing mobile audiences in a user-centric manner. We're also creating new distribution channels for our content, publishing more content than ever across the range of social platforms. And as Al will demonstrate the social platforms evolve, we've developed a model to evolve with them. And as a result of our mobile-first mindset and an increased social distribution, we're finding new audiences, ensuring our content is where our audiences are staying relevant for today and tomorrow's content consumers. In addition to diversifying our revenue streams, Future Studios is a center of excellence of Future, and this really is the epitome of platform effect. As you'll hear in a moment, Future Studios are not only creating a rich content for the Barcroft brands. Today, they run all video creation for Future. And working with our commercial sales team, ensure the discovery, distribution and monetization is maximized across the group. The content we're creating has many of the same evergreen characteristics as our written word and our philosophy of create once and monetize it many evidenced in many of the examples you'll see today. The results truly speak for themselves. Over the last 4 years, distribution has increased from 1 platform to 5, revenue has grown and crucially, operating profit margins have increased 27 percentage points. On that note, I will come off stage as a warm-up act and hand you over to John, who leads Future Studios.

Thank you, Zillah. Hello. I'm John, I'm the Chief Creative Officer for Future Studios. I joined Future as part of the Barcroft acquisition in 2019. I've been in the content business for 20-plus years, previously running development and production for global companies, including Tiger Aspect, Fremantle, Raw Television and Red Arrow. Over the course of this presentation, we will be covering 3 key areas: First, we'll begin with a brief background into the video division and how we create and monetize video for Future. Then, Katie O'Reilly, our Head of Operations, will walk you through our operating model and our strategy for content creation. We will then do a deep dive into the key pillars of our division and the value they bring to the Future. They are O&O. When we use the term O&O, we're referring to the team that produces video for our owned and operated brands, the short-form videos that accompany the editorial pieces on the website. The next pillar we'll look at is AVOD. AVOD is the short-form free-to-view content that we produce for social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat. And finally, we'll look at external. This is the long-form programming for linear clients like Channel 4 and Netflix. We've added a glossary of terms and definitions at the end of this presentation to make some of our industry language easier to follow. But before we begin, we'd like to kick off with a brief showreel of some of our recent highlights. [Presentation]

So who are we? And how do we create value? We are Future's in-house production division, servicing all the group's video needs. Our passion is authentic storytelling and creative excellence delivered to a global hyper-engaged audience. Our division produces everything from 60-second product reviews for 1 of our 245 brands to documentary content for YouTube, Snap and Facebook to primetime series for terrestrial broadcasters and streamers. We work in lockstep with our commercial teams to create bespoke sales opportunities and integrations, and we have a track record of taking high-value IP from the group and selling it direct to broadcasters like we successfully did with Games Master last year. In a nutshell, if it [ moves ], we produce it. But why is video so important right now? We believe video to be an area with tremendous growth potential and a fantastic way to diversify revenue within Future and as part of Future Studios. This year, we are significantly ramping up our output across all 3 pillars of our division. Our innovative production model is highly tuned to the needs of the audience. We evolve as they do, and Future scale means our video can reach more people than ever before. So how do we make money? Each of our 3 pillars has a different monetization model. But like the rest of the group, volume and audience growth are key components to our overarching strategy. This year, we will produce 2,400 videos for our owned and operated websites, generating a staggering 1.6 billion views annually. These videos help drive audiences to the sites and also create a sales opportunity for our commercial team to sell the pre-roll advertising that appears before each video. This team is headed up by our VP of Future Studios, Al Brown, who will go into further detail on this later in the presentation. Alongside our O&O teams is our AVOD team, who each year produce approximately 660 films that publish across YouTube, Snap and Facebook. These 5- to 6-minute films are fully financed by us but are monetized by the platforms. This is what we call off-platform revenue with the platform selling the advertising and splitting the revenue with us. This has proved to be a highly lucrative part of our business with high profit margins. And to give you a sense of our audience reach, last year on YouTube, we achieved 783 million views. On Facebook, we did 2.8 billion views and a further 1.8 billion views on Snap. In total, across these 3 platforms, our content was viewed an incredible 5.3 billion times. Snap, in particular, has become a key partner for us, where we currently have over 30 million subscribers compared to [indiscernible] 8.5 million. Our third and final pillar is our external team, who produced around 30 hours of long-form programming each year for terrestrial cable and streamer partners. The monetization model here is different again. This content is fully financed by either the channel or a brand, and we take a production team. Although this pillar operates at a lower margin, the halo effect of having a TV division is incredibly important to us. It becomes a lightning rod for best-in-class talent, it further diversifies our IP offering and it effectively gets our brand out onto the world stage. But the big opportunity here is rights exploitation and international format sales, and we are actively developing a slate to reflect this. I will now hand over to Katie who will walk you through our operating model.

Thanks, John. Hi. I'm Katie O'Reilly. I'm the Vice President of Operations at Future Studios. I started my career in corporate finance in Citi, but after 15 years was led into industry as a business consultant. Barcroft was my client from 2017 onwards. The opportunity to widen my realm under Future Studios was too enticing to carry on with consulting. I love working on all operational aspects of the video unit, and I'm really passionate about its success. We rebranded the video division to Future Studios in mid-2021 to better reflect the unification of all the video resources in Future under one umbrella with standardized ways of working and management, plus our intent to grow the offering significantly. We're often asked what our secret sauce is, and we say it's a combination of our talented creative team who come up with the video ideas, our approach to video monetization where we make one asset and attempt to monetize it through as many different distribution channels as possible and also our speedy, cost-efficient production model. So the aim of the game is to come up with 1 video concept, which works across as many platforms as possible, ideally, all of the AVOD platforms, YouTube, Facebook, Snap, TikTok and Insta to generate advertising revenue, also on the O&O side to attract pre-roll revenue and other integration revenues. And then the icing on the cake would be a long-form outcome, such as selling the show or format to a broadcaster, streamer or digital channel. We'll share some examples of this strategy throughout the presentation. In terms of the speedy video production model, this has a number of component parts: a development team who come up with new video ideas and formats for series; a casting and production team who find the stories and script the video; a global network of freelance videographers who film for us in locations where we do not have coverage; an editing team who take the film footage and bring the story to life through careful editing; a production management team who look after video budgets, deal with location fees, clearances and also other legal requirements; a postproduction team who ensure that the video meets all of the technical features required for distribution and also ensure all of the footage and end product is logged and stored in an efficient manner; a distribution team who publish the videos and curate the environment in which the video resides in order to achieve the maximum possible financial outcome. All of these teams work together to deliver the end product with the support teams working across the verticals to create efficiencies of production. We have video colleagues based in Bath, London, Redding, New York and L.A. We're in the process of gearing up our Atlanta content factory as we believe this is an incredible opportunity for onscreen and offscreen talent. We also have a network of 1,000 freelancers located around the world, meaning we can react quickly when we find a new story or need to gear up a local team. From an operational perspective, the external TV streamer and digital channel business is capital-light, as teams are brought in on a project-by-project basis. Our short-form video is mostly created by an in-house team, which means that costs could be carefully controlled and the speedy system of casting, production and publishing means that costs are swiftly converted into revenue once the video is published. And I'm pleased to be able to say that this operational excellence is bearing fruit. We have increased the number of key platforms we publish content on, plus have grown our revenue and expanded margin over the last 5 years. We are confident we can continue on this trajectory by increasing our ability to leverage the content without additional significant cost. This policy is firmly part of our presence in Future, with the expectation of monetization from 2 additional platforms, TikTok and Instagram, over the next few years. I'll now pass over to Al to talk more about video creation for Future's brands.

I'm Al. I'm the Vice President of Content Strategy of Future Studios. That means I spend most of my time looking ahead, trying to work out what our audience wants, what we should be making for them and how we can best monetize the content we make. This is where the art meets the science. By coming up with creative answers to the questions our data is asking, we can develop a video response that engages our audience and delivers increased video revenue for the business. Before Future, I was Head of Video at Vice Media and spent 10 years there launching and growing numerous video-first digital brands. Today, I'm going to talk to you about how we use video content to extend the reach of our brands and create new revenue for the group. This is the first pillar that John referred to earlier, our fully owned and operated video business. Over the last year at Future, we have undertaken a creative and operational refresh of our video production. We now work side by side with our editorial brands to drive deeper, more authentic video engagement, access new audiences and serve an ever-increasing ratio of pre-roll adverts for our partners. Let's have a look at what we have achieved in the last year. [Presentation]

As you can see, we've been evolving our approach to video content. At the same time, we have also been working in the background to perfect the monetization model. The backbone of our video monetization strategy is our pre-roll advertising business. We often talk about doing the basics better, and our approach to video mirrors that. Future scale and reach allows us the opportunity to get our video assets, and therefore, valuable advertising units in front of a huge, high-intent audience. Bespoke video content for Future brands is created to target high-traffic search, terms and pages. We then also utilize playlists and tag matching to make sure that highly contextual video is found on nearly all pages across the group. This means that when you visit a Future website, the video you see on the page has been chosen for you based on what brought you there in the first place. This is the first and most important step in creating genuine video engagement and driving on page yield. We utilize a live data dashboard that allows us to track a suite of key metrics to ensure we engage effectively with our audience and focus on monetizing this audience efficiently. The most important metric for our team is the ratio of page views we have successfully converted to video views. Over the last year, we have driven a 6 percentage point increase in this ratio, meaning that we are creating substantially more video views that can be turned into ad impressions, and therefore, monetized. It is also worth noting that we're seeing an increase in ad impressions over video views, which demonstrates that we are more effectively monetizing our content and are starting to successfully create multi-view sessions, where our viewers are consuming multiple videos, and therefore, multiple pre-roll ads. This is another key indicator of an engaged video audience. Both these positive trends are setting us up for an even more impactful year. And as a video team, we're incredibly excited for what 2022 will bring. But our work doesn't stop there. As we develop a new video franchise, we share ideas with our commercial and creative solutions teams to see if the content we are planning to create can be used to support the campaigns our advertisers are running through video sponsorships. Then we use the social video expertise that underpinned the Barcroft Studios acquisition to distribute our Future video far and wide across a variety of platforms. For example, the content created for Marie Claire lives on marieclaire.com as well as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. And recently through our partnership with Snap, we are bringing Marie Claire content to a whole new audience on that platform. All of these platforms monetize in a subtly different way, but it creates a new set of diverse revenue streams for the video business. Now I want to pass you to Zack Sullivan, our Chief Revenue Officer, who will give an overview of the video advertising stack.

Thank you, Al, and hello. I'm Zack Sullivan, the Chief Revenue Officer. And I'd like to provide you with an overview of how we monetize video at Future and how HYBRID, our proprietary ad stack, helps this process. As the team have already highlighted, Future scale, output and ambition in the video arena is growing. To match this growth, we ensure that we monetize the hundreds of millions of video advertising opportunities each month with a range of ad products that are made available to our clients and partners. As you can see on this slide, video ads are impactful formats. On average, their yields are about 4x greater than standard display ads. As a result, we're focusing on improving further our capabilities through this ad stack, enabling more video ads. Future's own proprietary advertising stack, HYBRID, allows us to control and optimize the monetization of our video globally. We connect multiple demand sources to allow seamless transactions with buyers, both directly and through high-yielding demand partners. Our video inventory can be targeted by a buyer in a number of ways, including contextually or through our own first-party audience platform, Aperture. This allows us to build high-value segments. These targeted solutions, both of which are not impacted by changes to third-party cookies, allow buyers to reach our high-value intent-based audiences as they access our portfolio of premium content. We offer a wide variety of video advertising products that buyers can access, our highest-yielding deals as through direct and premium programmatic channels similar to display ads. These offer buyers access to enhance targeting and creative solutions. We then operate a waterfall model, connecting a range of curative marketplaces and integrations to drive market demand and increase yield. HYBRID helps manage this process to drive efficiency and yield across the platform. We are continuing to invest engineering resources into the optimization of our video advertising stack. We have a road map for further developments to optimize yield across the various buying channels, which include launching new advertising products and delivery mechanisms. So thank you, and back to you, Al.

As you can see, the opportunity here is a big one, which is why this year, we are deepening our investment in video at Future. We will increase the number of assets we create each month and expand our capabilities into every one of Future's verticals, with a new focus on the currently less optimized to drive higher on-site video revenue across the group. And this year, we will meaningfully invest in Future's social channels to extend reach, create new sources of referral traffic and unlock more new revenue streams. Now back to John who will run you through our off-platform digital video business.

Thanks, Al. So when we talk about our AVOD pillar, what do we mean? AVOD is the content we produce for social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Snap. Each month, our AVOD team produces over 55 films, with each asset being reversion for each platform. We have over 20 million subscribers on YouTube, over 70 million followers on Facebook and over 30 million followers on Snap. At present, there is no monetization model for production companies like ours on TikTok and Instagram, but this will change, and we're aggressively growing our presence on these platforms for when the monetization gets turned on. On TikTok, we're now at 317,000 followers, which is up 50% since July. Overall, our social content is viewed over 500 million times a month. Simply put, our audience is our superpower. Although we're driven by passion, we're informed by data. Our followers give us real-time insights from interest and audience behaviors to trends and conversations. We use this data to inform our creative strategy for both long and short-form content. This means our content is forever evolving. But as Katie mentioned, the agility of our organization enables us to maximize opportunities. Through all these platforms, the key performance metric is now dwell time, which is something we excel at. Platforms like Snap and TikTok now favor dwell times over clicks when deciding which content should be surfaced by the algorithm. On Snap, our average dwell time is 1 minute, 48 when anything above the 1-minute mark is considered exceptional. On Facebook, our watch times are 4x higher than the platform average. And when you look at the competitor analysis, you can see our engagement levels on Facebook, in terms of average views per video, are significantly higher than Channel 4 and the Daily Mail. And like everything in our business, we do it once and we monetize it many. And just like how we can repurpose O&O assets for AVOD and vice versa, we also grow AVOD assets and turn them into long-form television. The revenue waterfalls for each platform are slightly different. On Snap, we see immediate return with revenue hitting within the week for each asset. This is different from Facebook and YouTube, where the content is evergreen and monetizes across a number of years. Our AVOD business is nimble, agile and bulletproof. Even in lockdown, we were able to produced an incredible volume of assets. When we couldn't physically go out and film, we created new content out of our library, leaned into user-generated content and became pioneers of remote production. This is an incredibly robust part of our business, and the opportunities are endless. Looking ahead at how we further grow and diversify, this year, we'll see us make a push to amplify our future brands on social, and we're actively launching digital shows for space.com, Tom's Guide and Pets Radar. Over the last few years, we've devised a model where we take our social content and reskin it for linear TV. Ultimate Rides is one such example. It began life as a YouTube series called Ridiculous Rides. We then took it to Snap and Facebook and repackaged it as a multi-item 20-part TV series, and we're currently in production on our second series for A&E in the U.S. This gives us multiple bites of the cherry and means we control the underlying IP. This model protects our rights. It means we can sell the finished tape internationally. We are only one of a handful of teams that have made this innovative model work. Our external team has had to evolve significantly over the last 2 years. COVID has meant that it's harder than ever to launch ambitious, logistically challenging productions. We have, however, risen to the challenge, and we're thriving. We were one of the first companies to get back into the studios as New York reopened back in 2020 to shoot a craft format for Discovery. We have also lend into archiving user-generated based content and have excelled at remote production, with teams directing content all over the world from London. In 2021, we sold shows to Channel 4, Channel 5, A&E, Netflix, National Geographic, Discovery and HGTV. And following a very successful relationship with Snap on the partnership side, we also now regularly win commissions from their originals team and have become one of their suppliers. In 2021, we produced 3 premium short-form series on the social issues that matter most to young people. Earlier last year, we set ourselves a goal to get GamesMaster, a British institution and legacy Future brand, back on our screens. This is a brand that touches many parts of our business, from the Golden Joystick Awards to the pages of TechRadar. And we knew that if we could bring it back, we could create a huge amount of noise if we could get a major broadcaster on board, and we did. Working closely with the commercial team at Channel 4, we were able to bring financing to the table by Meta, formerly known as Facebook, who are in the process of launching their new Oculus VR headset. We pivoted our creative proposition to reflect this and created a truly cross-platform event that lived across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, linear Television and created a huge amount of noise across our tech and gaming sites. [Presentation]

We were long formed, we were short formed, and we were everywhere. We lean into the expertise of our colleagues in tech and gaming to serve the viewer exactly what they wanted, something that was true to the original concept but also reflected the modern gamer. This is something no other company could have done, and the result was one of the most successful brand partnerships in E4 history. And as we come out of the global pandemic, we see a huge amount of potential for our ambitious non-scripted content. We're focused on fewer, bigger, better, shows with scale and ambition that align with Future's core principles of connecting people to their passions through high-quality content. In 2021, we were nominated for the Broadcast Awards Best Multi-Platform Production Company and for Digital Channel of the Year. We also made it on to Realscreen's prestigious Global 100, one of only a handful of U.K. companies to make the list. And we were singled out by our clients as best-in-class partners at the forefront of short-form storytelling and incredible partners through what's been an extremely difficult year. I'm immensely proud to lead this team and excited to see what we achieved in 2022. Back over to you, Zillah.

Thank you very much, John and the team. I'm sure you can see why we're as excited as we are about the development at Future Studios. This really does underpin our strategy, delivering diversified revenues through digital ads and AVOD monetization while accessing new audiences. While the center of excellence is allowing us to grow fast while driving material increases in our profits, Future Studios operates in a high-growth market with clear demonstratable leading content. And the acquisition of Barcroft just over 2 years ago really does highlight how Future and acquisitions can work together to create something new and deliver superior returns to our shareholders. This is another example of our transaction. We've doubled earnings within 2 years with the long-term strategic opportunity is only just beginning. And with that, I will open the session up for questions. Thank you.

Thank you very much, everyone. I'll open up the session for questions. And I see we have a couple already. The first one came through from Malcom, asking around do we make multiple versions of each piece of content, different presenters, male, female, age, language, et cetera? If I start this now, I'll hand over to John who can just finish off the question. Fundamentally, our strategy here is the same as it is the rest of our brands, which is we are English language first, and we're looking to identify global audiences. So in the same way that we don't create multiple versions of GamesRadar or TechRadar, we take the same philosophy. But we do, by format, I think, adapt to the program. John, do you want to pick up the answer?

Yes, that's exactly right. So although we're not tweaking content specifically for key demographics, we are for the platform. So we're optimizing for all the different social platforms. And so we're very cognizant of dwell times. We're very cognizant of like how those platforms, how those users respond to those platforms and also just simple things like aspect ratio, whether it's horizontal or whether it's vertical. So they're all tweaked, but it's essentially the same piece of content that's living across multiple places.

So the next question came in from Gareth, which was really picking up on a point I was making around the fact that we're across a number of platforms but not all of them and whether or not -- what we see is the opportunity there. So Al, are you happy to pick that up in terms of how the evolution of our platform and our experience with Snap, for example?

I think the question is more around which verticals, isn't it, that we are creating video around? Yes. So I guess in terms of the -- as I said in the presentation, we do -- we create video for a lot of Future's verticals at the moment. And the point being around wanting to target ones that are currently underoptimized, where we see the biggest opportunity in terms of where we can make the most money from the video content that we're creating. And so we're going to be focusing quite heavily on homes as well as women's lifestyle and wealth and in terms of sport and music. But that doesn't mean that we won't be continuing to make a lot of content for tech and gaming as well.

I think Roddy had now just asked the question I thought we'd ask. Do you want to answer that one?

Wait, which one is that? Sorry, I can't see. What was the question he's just asked then? Could you talk a little bit -- yes. So I guess in that case, we're talking about Instagram and we're talking about TikTok. And so currently, yes -- as John mentioned in the presentation, currently, there's no way for publishers like ourselves to monetize on those platforms. But that doesn't mean that that's not come in and all the conversations that we have with those platforms make us believe that, that will be coming fairly soon. The most important thing is, at the moment, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't invest in those platforms, and we shouldn't be building audience, create engagement and leading our brands onto those platforms because they represent audience that can benefit our brands in the long term.

Great. So the next couple of questions are both about advertising, one which is what's your view on advertiser-funded content? And the second one around can we increase video advertising and the mix fast enough to benefit from the ForEx display ads? If I asked -- Zack, do you want to start with that and then maybe hand over if anyone else wants to pick up, but I think we know the answer to the question.

Yes, absolutely. So it's -- video advertisers are very, very in-demand, ad products and ad channel in the market currently. Honestly, we've done a fantastic job at creating new ad impressions for this and the team to take out. And it's incremental into pages, a new product that existing teams can take out. And so we're leveraging our existing relationships with key advertisers and agencies to sell it. And we don't see any sign of that demand abating in the short term. We think it will continue to grow in the near and medium future. And we think that it will become increasingly important in the overall ad mix.

In terms of the yield question, if I pick that up, in digital video advertising is only about 12% of our total digital advertising mix just now. It grew materially last year, and we're continuing to see growth into this year. I think the important thing is this is another great example of our diversification strategy, where the studios provide us both an additional lever to grow both off-platform, but also provides us a lever to grow our total digital advertising revenue.

Thank you, Penny. So then I think the question came in about cannibalization. So it's a brilliant question around audience cannibalization. Do we think that video takes readers away from some article? I have a start here, maybe John can finish off for us. I think the headline answer to that is no, we think it actually enhances the user experience. What we find is that consumers increasingly want to consume videos with the written word, and we see that Google have been highlighting to us recently that's a key indicator there for customer experience when they look at quality of content on an owned and operated site. But we also think one of the really important point here is that strategically over the next X to X years, adding a new audience, particularly the younger demographic who are going social first is what the opportunity arises for us here. So we do think that we enhance the existing proposition and also add a new audience. John, I don't know if you want to add anything to that? Are you happy with that?

Yes. And I think you absolutely covered it. I mean the key here for us is that those 2 pieces of content absolutely live side by side, and they're completely connected. So the article relates to the video to keep the user absolutely kind of engaged. They offer something slightly different, but it's part of the same -- absolutely part of the same story.

Brilliant. So there's a question here then with regards to TikTok about has it set a date for monetization to be switched on or is an indication of what the monetization policy looks like? Who wants to take that one?

Yes, there's no official date from TikTok there. I think you've got to remember that there's still a fairly new platform. And the reality is that they spend most of their time trying to grow that platform and grow audience. If you spend much time on Tiktok, you'll notice the way that it works at the moment, they serve one ad after every sort of 5 or 6 videos. What they don't have -- it's very hard for them to attribute which video has kind of should receive the benefit of that ad at the moment, and that's why they don't pay out in that way. I think from their point of view, they're looking to make changes to the platform that allow those advertising dollars to be attributed to certain publishers, but that's -- I mean, yes, there's no like official announcement from TikTok yet on that, but I think it's coming soon.

Fantastic. So the next question is from Ross around ability to track user behavior when on a third-party platform versus such as Snap versus a Future site or first-party data. Zack, do you want to start with that one?

Yes, absolutely. So I think this is just a key differential between the monetization options. So on Snap, Snap are taking the content and then they're monetizing it using the targeting capabilities that they have and then we get the revenue share back, and that's the AVOD monetization channel. When the videos are running all in all on Future's on property, we're able to use Aperture, our own proprietary tech platform. And the great thing about the way that the video content works on site with HYBRID, the tech stack is that we get all of the Aperture data targeting you would for our core products today. So we think it's really materially enhancing to our existing advertising offering on the O&O. And it's not impacted by the reduction in third-party cookies for that solution.

Question about the Atlanta content factory. Will have to tell you a bit more about that. I think you might recall, we announced just before the new year that we were opening our low-cost location hub in Atlanta, which is our commitment to our North America first strategy. And we're getting to 1 and 2 in terms of audience reach there. The Future Studios team were nearly -- when I said Barcroft. The Future Studios team are particularly excited about Atlanta as a content hub for creative and our -- the anchor tenants in our Atlanta location, looking to particularly make that our women's and homes hub in North America going forward. So we're pretty excited about that. And that office is actually open now, and we're hiring directly into that today. The next question then that came from Nick Dempsey asking about natural search. With the view being here, but if people are coming in by YouTube, does that not mean that you'll see a product video? And does that mean that we would never have enough video to score there as well? I think the key point here for us, Nick is complementarity. So one of the things that -- first of all, Google evolves and the consumer online evolves as well. And so what we recognize is that for a lot of our online content, we need to add video into it, and that's where the Future Studios team have been just amazing in terms of helping us do that at a scale level in a way in which we couldn't do previously, certainly cost effectively. And we know that enhances the user experience and we get that feedback from Google direct. At the same time, however, what we're doing is making sure that across all the platforms socially, we have distribution models in place that we can -- where possible monetize. I think one of the things that's really important to us to make sure that we remain agile, which I think John mentioned in terms of the fact that the social platforms evolve. They come in and out of fashion. So what we have to do is our mindset about creating content for social platforms, not creating content for at social platform. And that's what we're really trying to demonstrate today is that there's a division within Future Studios, it's all about monetizing on the AVOD platforms, but isn't specifically to one channel. Tim, I see here then you asked a question about isn't a shelf life shorter for video than written content. It is for some and not for others. And we were hoping to try and get across today, we clearly didn't do it well enough. One of the reasons why we actually bought Barcroft was they had a chart in their investor presentation when we were doing the diligence, which talked about the evergreen nature of a lot of the content. We're like, oh, we've got something like that, too. This feels like a bit like us. Let me dig into that more. It very much behaves like the Future content. There is a proportion which remains evergreen, which gets used on some of the social platforms. And there's another proportion which is more kind of newsy but like our space.com or our life science sites. And so it's a bit of a blend of both. But what was really important with Future Studios is the speedy system, so they make their content in a really cost-effective way. So even if it has got a shorter shelf life, it can still give a really powerful ROI, and that was a key driver for us in the last -- in the acquisition. I think, the last question, because I know we've gone over time, and I apologize that, which is about giving us a sense of the addressable market for social media, video content and what our production budgets for the major platforms in all that markets. And how has it evolved? I'm definitely not answering this one. I'm looking around the room to see if anyone else wants to have an answer at it. John is going to have a go. Fantastic.

Yes. So they're completely varying. So if we're talking about a streamer like Netflix, we might be putting a budget in that's $1 million an episode, and we're looking for 8 episodes. That's absolutely the kind of high premium end. We're then working with cable channels -- U.S. cable channels, which are about half of that. So that would be like a U.S. cable channel like an A&E. Then when we go down into the social platforms, if we're making original content for Snap, I mean that might be something around $50,000 per episode. And then there's also -- when we talk about Al's product reviews for Future video, that's a very, very low-cost, high-volume model. So what's so exciting about our team is that we can absolutely hit every single point on that kind of production chart. So it's completely varied.

Great. Well, thank you all so much for your time. I really appreciate you listening, and we hope this answers some of the questions that came up in the last couple of months. I look forward to seeing you all again soon. Thank you. Bye-bye.