The meeting that changed the future of media in Canada

And the beginning of blogTO’s video era

On the morning of June 29, 2016, I took the elevator to the 10th floor of the TD North Tower at 77 King St. West in the Financial District, a short walk from the blogTO office. I had been invited to participate in a policy roundtable on the future of journalism in Canada.

The meeting had been organized by the Public Policy Forum (PPF) and was backed by the Government of Canada. It was one of six roundtables being convened across the country that year, and it became a precursor to the Canadian government’s escalating intervention in the media industry over the years that followed.

The policies that emerged, including the Canadian journalism labour tax credit and the Online News Act, would have a direct impact on blogTO and on the digital media industry in Canada.

I walked into the meeting room, a long boardroom table under unflattering lighting, and took stock. It was a who’s who of Canadian legacy media. Paul Godfrey, the president and CEO of Postmedia, was at the table. So was Phillip Crawley, the publisher and CEO of the Globe and Mail. Senior executives from CBC and Torstar were present. Ken Whyte from Rogers was seated beside me and, at one point during the morning, leaned over to tell me he was impressed with what we had built at blogTO and that he was a big fan. Representatives from Google, Unifor, several universities and various consultants rounded out the group. Government officials sat in as observers.

On the digital side, there was Jesse Brown from Canadaland, Jeff Elgie from Village Media, and me. An uninspired spread of bagels, muffins and coffee greeted those who had arrived with an empty stomach.

When we went around the table for introductions, I mentioned that the only person I knew in the room was Peter Jacobsen, the media lawyer who had defended blogTO years earlier when a Toronto hair salon threatened to sue us over reader comments on the site. It got a small laugh.

The meeting was framed as a discussion about how the Canadian government could support a media industry that was vital to maintaining a healthy democracy, but it was really about whether the government should intervene to support newspapers, whose advertising revenue was collapsing and whose business models were no longer viable.

Rather than examining their own strategic missteps, high cost structures, or lack of meaningful audience development and digital innovation, the newspaper executives in the room focused their energy on Google and Facebook and on how those platforms were capturing an ever-growing share of advertising revenue in Canada. (Not surprisingly, this misdirected narrative still persists today.)

Jesse, Jeff, and I were given limited speaking time, but when the opportunity arose, we pushed back against the idea that government intervention was the answer. Our audiences and revenue were growing. We were profitable. The companies struggling were the ones still relying on business models that had stopped working. Government intervention, we argued, risked damaging the new wave of digital media companies that were thriving. Legacy media organizations that couldn’t adapt should be allowed to fail rather than be propped up with public money. In other words, let natural market forces play out the way they do in every other industry.

The framing of the discussion and the composition of the room made it clear that the concerns and arguments we raised were unlikely to carry much weight. The materials distributed in advance of the meeting described a “crisis” defined almost entirely through the lens of legacy media decline. Postmedia was heading toward insolvency. Torstar’s market value was collapsing in the wake of the failed Star Touch project. New digital entrants were mentioned, but the tone suggested we were part of the disruption rather than part of the solution.

I sat there listening. The legacy executives were describing an industry in freefall. From my perspective, the industry wasn’t dying. It was changing. Facebook and Google weren’t just threats. They were distribution channels that media companies could leverage and build on. They were also the platforms where a growing number of Canadians were turning first for news and information, whether legacy media companies liked it or not.

I left the TD Tower that morning feeling the whole meeting had been largely performative.

The following year, the PPF released a report with recommendations that informed subsequent policies, culminating in the Online News Act, which went into effect in 2023. The Act resulted in a $100 million annual payment from Google to the Canadian media industry, most of which would flow to newspapers, Bell, Rogers, the CBC and other legacy outlets. Meta, rather than comply, chose to block all news content on Facebook and Instagram for Canadian users.

University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist has called the Online News Act “a massive miscalculation that has caused more harm than good.” Many others agree. Digital media companies like blogTO that had invested in building audiences on social platforms and developed revenue models around them ended up paying the steepest price, while the legacy organizations that had failed to adapt or made strategic blunders benefited the most. I’ll have more to say about the Online News Act in future posts. But all of it traced back to that morning on the 10th floor.

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While the policy wheels were turning, we had our heads down building and creating. By the summer of 2016, blogTO had begun consistently producing and publishing video content on Facebook for the first time.

Social video was a very different world back then. The term “reels” didn’t exist. Vertical video wasn’t a thing yet. We shot everything on DSLRs in landscape orientation and cut it together in Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere. The video content was primarily food-focused, and we gravitated toward items that were unusual, visually striking and engineered to stop someone mid-scroll.

The video that might have set the whole thing in motion came in the spring. Eva’s Original Chimneys, a food truck that had recently launched in Toronto, was serving something called a doughnut cone that no one in the city had encountered before. We shot 43 seconds of the cone being assembled and filled with ice cream. Nobody from blogTO appeared on camera. There was no voiceover, no narration, no captions of any kind. Just simple, edited footage of the process.

The video exploded, collecting over 10 million views and upwards of 40,000 comments. We had stumbled onto a formula, and we leaned into it hard. Churro cones, ice cream tacos, rolled ice cream, towering milkshakes crowned with slices of cake, rainbow grilled cheese sandwiches, cartoonishly stacked burgers. Each video followed the same playbook: short, visual, designed to make you stop scrolling, start watching and engage.

In 2016, and for several years after, Facebook’s algorithm was geared toward prioritizing this kind of video content. Half a million views and thousands of comments on a single video became the baseline of what success looked like. Advertising inquiries flooded in from brands, restaurants and retailers, all competing for a spot on the blogTO Facebook page. I remember riding the streetcar that summer and regularly spotting passengers watching our videos on their phones. That was the moment it started to feel like we had tapped into something new and much bigger than what we had imagined it could be.

Instagram hadn’t yet evolved into the video platform it is today. In 2016, it was still predominantly a photo platform. Video support was limited, and formats were restricted to square, so we cropped our landscape footage to fit. Even with those constraints, the introduction of video content sparked a noticeable jump in engagement and follower growth on our Instagram account, an early signal of the trajectory that would eventually make Instagram central to the business.

We tried other formats as well. That year, Chris Kowalewski and Rob Hyrkiel approached us with an idea for a weekly series called Stuck on the Gardiner, a punchy two-minute recap of the biggest Toronto stories from the past week, filmed from the driver’s seat of their car while idling in Gardiner Expressway traffic. I loved the series, but it ran into the same problem as the Morning Brew: roundup content doesn’t get shared the way individual stories do. The series lasted about a year before it was wound down.

We had experimented with video at various points in blogTO’s history, from shooting Toronto Fashion Week content distributed via Vimeo back in 2009 to posting a scattered collection of clips on YouTube over the years, but all of it had been created by freelancers we hired. That changed in the fall of 2016 when we brought on Aaron Navarro as our first full-time video hire. Aaron helped us ramp up our output considerably, and by March of 2017, he had authored the first official blogTO video style guide, a document that codified a signature visual identity for our video content. The style meant that a blogTO video was immediately recognizable as ours, even though the format later became widely imitated across the industry.

Revenue for the video content was ramping up alongside increased creative output, and much of that was due to our external sales team at Suite 66 and to Treva Goodhead, who had joined them as VP of Business Development. Treva proved to be one of the most important members of the Suite 66 team over the years. She and I worked closely on video monetization strategy and advertising decisions. She understood how I operated, recognized the types of video content I was comfortable selling, and respected the boundaries I set. I was very selective about which clients and campaigns we accepted, and frequently turned down revenue opportunities if they didn’t feel right.

Our pricing in the early days didn’t fully reflect the value we were delivering. Pusateri’s paid us $800 for a video about their Nutella cafe that generated over 800,000 views. Yorkdale paid $700 for a video showcasing their new food offerings that landed just under a million views. Adjusting our rates upward would come over time, but we never wanted to set them too high so that small local businesses couldn’t afford them.

Suite 66 often packaged Facebook videos alongside other placements, combining them with Instagram and Twitter posts or banner ads on the website. By 2016, the blogTO website was generating more than 10 million page views a month. We had larger followings than our competitors on the three dominant social platforms of the day. We had three mobile apps and growing subscriber lists across our email newsletters. Unlike many of our competitors, we weren’t dependent on a single platform. We had built blogTO into a brand with reach and momentum across the key digital channels where our audience spent time, supported by multiple distinct and complementary advertising offerings, all while keeping the audience experience and trust at the centre of everything we did.

But the one thing we were missing was a face. For all their success, our videos didn’t yet feature on-camera personalities. That changed in 2017 when we hired someone who became the first face people would associate with blogTO. More on that in my next post.