The Daily Mail, which has spent the better part of two decades perfecting the art of the sidebar of shame, is now betting that its future lies in vertical video.

The tabloid publisher is introducing a video division called New Media to its American operation this month, featuring what the company describes as "creator-led social video franchises" staffed by its own editorial employees, according to Bob Marshall, the head of content for DMG Media in the United States. The unit is a transplant from Britain, where a version has been operating for about a year and now employs more than 100 people producing videos that the publisher says average around 300,000 views each.

The expansion reflects a broader calculation — or perhaps a hope dressed up as a calculation — that social video will become an increasingly significant source of advertising dollars. Social video currently accounts for roughly 20 percent of the Daily Mail's direct advertising revenue, a figure the company expects to exceed 33 percent by 2027, according to Kiera Haley, the senior vice president of sales at the publication.

(Whether that projection proves accurate will depend on variables that include the continued hospitality of platforms the Daily Mail does not control, which has historically been a reliable source of anxiety for publishers.)

The move comes at a moment when traditional publishers are grasping for new revenue streams as traffic from search engines has become considerably less dependable. The Daily Mail, for its part, appears to have concluded that if readers are going to consume content in feeds curated by algorithms, the company might as well be producing the sort of content those algorithms favor.

The division's name, New Media, carries a certain retro charm — the term having last been fashionable around the time people were still debating whether blogs would replace newspapers. But nomenclature aside, the bet is clear enough: the future will be vertical, brief, and filmed.

Original story published in adweek.com: "Daily Mail Launches Unit to Push Social Video to 33% of Direct Ad Revenue by 2027"