Keanu Reeves was live on blogTO’s Instagram.
It was the night of December 16, 2021, the Canadian premiere of The Matrix Resurrections, and our team was in the photo pit at Scotiabank Theatre on Richmond Street. Nearly 6,000 people were watching on our Instagram live stream when Keanu stepped onto the red carpet.
That night was a payoff. It came from a strategy born out of pandemic necessity. Let me rewind to the start of the year to explain.
Toronto entered 2021 in its second year of lockdowns, and blogTO entered what would become its final full year as an independent company. Our followers on social platforms kept growing, and web traffic reached a new all-time high of 32 million page views a month, and more than 350 million for the calendar year.
But something bigger was shifting beneath those numbers. For years, the website had subsidized our investment in emerging platforms and new initiatives. By 2021, that investment had paid off: Instagram and other social video platforms were on pace not just to be where most people saw our content but also where we generated the most revenue and the most profits.