S1/E11: What if digital strategies are just strategies?
- Jim Sector
- Mar 7, 2024
- 4 min read
LABNOTES is a production of SECTORLAB and is designed to help people at cultural organizations to challenge conventional thinking by presenting ideas from inside and outside our sector. These ideas are also put to use in consulting.
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Season 1 / Edition 11
CASE STUDY
Over the past 6 years, an international team of historians & documentary filmmakers working under the name TimeGhost History have been creating the largest documentary project on World War Two ever made – and are distributing it for free on YouTube.
This series takes you through the war “in real time”, by recapping what happened on each and every week of the conflict, starting in September 2018 with Germany’s September 1939 invasion of Poland, and concluding this August with Japan’s surrender (1945).
They’re on week 288 now, and have earned 178 million views and 870k subscribers, who tune in weekly for 15-30 min recaps.
Engaging people with topics like this is certainly within the scope, if not the exact mission, of many cultural organizations – so what can we learn from a project like this?
TimeGhost’s approach is a novel one: the telling of history “forwards” leads to a different kind of understanding than retrospective retellings. This is made possible through the serialization that their medium allows.
That serialization, in the ongoing nature of the series (and long, binge-able history) recalls network TV and builds ongoing devotion – many of their 870k subscribers tune in each week. This ongoing engagement helps drive their donor base – their primary income stream (I wrote about this more here).
This connection to network TV is reinforced by familiar format: a news report crossed with a talk show (I get Jon Stewart / Daily Show vibes) with an engaging host & presentational style, which communicates a high density of information in an accessible and entertaining, non-academic way.
The week-by-week narrative is supplemented by spin-offs that dive deeper into topics that wouldn’t fit into weekly summaries - in both “one-off” specials and sub-series offshoots (e.g. “War Against Humanity” runs parallel to the main series and chronicles the human cost of the conflict). It’s like the Marvel Cinematic Universe of historical documentaries, with over 400 hours of spiderwebbed content.
The size of this audience reminds us there is a significant amount of people eager for deep, long-form content – see also: the podcast Hardcore History, whose series requires 15-20 hours (!) to complete and boasts millions of downloads per episode.
This is a great example of using the “long tail” of the internet to build a large, young, global audience within a niche (one that’s similar to many of ours), and engage them in a way that builds strong, ongoing relationships and donor-ship.
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OBSERVATIONS
There’s virtually no way a physical “home” could have this kind of geographical reach, repeat engagement, or accessibility (either physically, or in engaging those who may not think a museum is for them). Would our missions be better served by creating a digital “product” equal in status to the traditional in-person experience? How would this change how we’re structured?
It’s probably worth thinking about: the creator economy (of which TimeGhost is part) is huge, with one estimate showing it generated $250 billion in 2023 (and is still growing). YouTube in particular commands more than twice as much total user time as TikTok, and 40 percent more time than Facebook. Analyst Benedict Evans estimates that YouTube and Netflix have roughly equivalent viewing volume in the US, but unlike Netflix (and its ilk) YouTube is “a channel, a platform, a discovery mechanism, and a revenue model” all rolled into one.
As the UK’s now-famous Tank Museum (a museum successfully employing this kind of strategy) and my case study on DR Koncerthuset show, the cultivation of an audience through a digital-first strategy can synergistically grow the importance of the in-person experience, turning it into a “destination”.
While the freedom to do something like this unshackled to institutional oversight is probably an advantage for TimeGhost vs. a similar endeavor from an institution, there are distinct areas in which an project like this might benefit from being connected to one (access to grants / foundation / government support, a more robust sponsorship structure, a more developed administrative or fundraising team), and an institution might in turn benefit from the access to audience, digital/entertainment literacy, and ability to explore “deep” content that a creator might bring. Is it time for a “content creator in residence?”
Even if you only produce a couple videos a year, there are important lessons here. An approachable, engaging “host” can help build attachment - psychologically, it’s easier for people to connect with an individual than an institution. TimeGhost utilizes familiar formats like nightly news/talk shows – think about the kinds of formats you see on TV, and how they might be adapted.
TAKE ACTION
When you’re ready, here’s how I can help you:
If you thought this was cool, contact me and I can share more info – and how this could be adapted in a practical way.
If you have an organization I should look into, please let me know.
If you want to see what kinds of strategies might be good for your organization, I offer a free evaluation.
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