K atie c ouric

Leveraging Other People’s Content to Grow Fast
Wade grew his Facebook page “The Wall of Comedy!” to 4.2 million
followers in under two years, and currently it generates over 350 million
views per month. All this growth has been organic; his team has never spent
a penny on advertising. From Wade’s perspective, advertising dollars aren’t
necessary if you have creative zest and the right ideas.
One of the brilliant facts about his Facebook page is that 70 percent of
the content is licensed and only 30 percent is original. He’s leveraged other
people’s content to help build an audience so that later his team could go
back and push their own original content to that same audience. It’s also
important to note that Wade’s not paying for the licensed content—he’s
simply offering video creators the ability to reach the huge audience he has
built, which generates exposure for them as creators. This is a smart way to
marry my system with an organic strategy. Build a massive following and
then approach content partners to license their content for free in exchange
for exposing their brand to your newly built audience.
Netflix is a perfect example of a company that employed a similar
strategy. It originally started with a group of popular licensed content that
people already loved, with TV series like 
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
and
Disney movies. Netflix brought viewers to a hub where they could watch all
their favorite shows and flicks, which made it easy to build an audience.
And once that audience was large enough, Netflix created and released
original content.

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When that original content came out . . . 
bam!
There was a ready-made
audience for it, which gave them leverage to release shows of the
magnitude of 
House of Cards
and 
Orange Is the New Black
. Would they
have been as successful without Netflix’s built-in audience? It’s hard to say
for certain, but we do know that Netflix had been building their customer
base through licensed content for more than fifteen years before they
released those original programs.
Jukin Media, known as the Getty Images for viral videos, has created a
very lucrative business because of content leveraging. Jukin licenses viral
user-generated videos from all over the world. It supplies content from its
channels and massive library to other people so they can leverage it to build
their brands. Jukin’s library of content includes hilarious fail clips (e.g.,
people falling off things, playing pranks), pet videos, and videos of people
doing amazing things (e.g., backflips, remarkable stunts). It works with
some of the biggest TV shows and media companies in the world and some
of the biggest digital publishers and websites, including AOL, the
Huffington Post
, and Yahoo! The idea behind the company is that you can
rewatch the same video many times; content can be repackaged and
repurposed. Jukin has figured out a way to extend the lifetime value of
content, which helps brands as it’s really hard to create content from scratch
because of the high costs associated with filmmaking. Between YouTube
and Facebook, it currently has about eighty million followers, which has all
been built by leveraging the power of found footage and authentic content
created by other creators. Jukin’s team members have become experts and
have collected data about which types of content go viral organically.
Whether you’re running a company that’s struggling to generate
significant engagement on social platforms or someone who’s building a
personal brand from scratch, you can partner with other people or brands,
license and leverage others’ content, or join share and engagement groups
to get a more well-rounded content-strategy approach. You can still
prioritize and push your original content but also leverage the power of
strategic alliances to significantly grow your audience and engagement.