Hearst Magazines' Zuri Rice on how to get 1 billion video views a month: 'It always comes back to our audience'

Hearst Magazines' properties garner 1 billion video views per month. For its head of video, Zuri Rice, that number (and the more granular "watch time") is almost incidental: "Total watch time is something that we think about, but total watch time, of course, is really tied to volume," she said on this week's episode of the Digiday Podcast. "So I think for us it's thinking about, as we're growing, how are people connecting with our video?"

As the company's senior vice president of video development and content strategy, Rice also wants to make sure they're publishing everywhere. "Platforms are parts of our audience and parts of the pie," she said. "One might be a place where we are getting more revenue, another might be a place where we're really connecting to the audience. Of course, it's always great when we have places that do both."

On YouTube, Hearst counts 20 million subscribers on YouTube across their properties -- which include Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, and Men's Health.

Rice joined the podcast to discuss how Facebook's potential for video is down but not out, how the company thinks about its content and the merits of short-form versus long-form video.