Verizon Exercising Patience With Go90

6 Dec, 2016 By: Erik Gruenwedel

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Since launching in October 2015, Verizon’s free go90 mobile video app has targeted younger adults, Millennials (adults ages 18-35) and others seemingly tethered to smartphones, tablets and laptops for their video entertainment, sports, finance and news.

With a goal of bridging the content divide between traditional and digital distributors, other go90 video genres include style, comedy, drama, action, reality and talk from video sources such as AwesomenessTV, AOL and Rated Red (for heartland Millennials), among others.

Original series include “Mr. Student Body President,” “Coach Snoop,” “Olivia Has 2 Moms” and “The Runner,” a $1 million summer reality competition series from Ben Affleck and Matt Damon that was quietly eclipsed by Pokémon Go.

Speaking Dec. 6 at the UBS 44th annual Global Media and Communications confab in New York, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said an “awful lot of the hype” early about go90 has given way to measured thinking among senior management.

“We knew that this was going to be what we called a ‘patient money’ business. If you look, for example, how long it took Netflix to really ramp up and hit their stride, that is sort of a model for us.”

In the most recent quarter, rollercoaster viewership use topped 30 minutes per month — a data point McAdam expects to increase exponentially after closing the Yahoo acquisition.

“It does sound like a lot people are coming back [to go90] and they're doing a two or three minutes [of video] at a time, and that gives us a chance to put our other monetization efforts in the place, such as the [targeted] advertising that we mentioned from AOL. So, we’re building slowly. We’re happy with that … [and] we’re continuing to invest in that sort of unique content.”

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