CMCSA Comcast Corporation

By Mike Shields 

Not long ago, Telemundo was using YouTube the same way many broadcast networks do: as a way to promote its own shows with short clips. That was before people discovered the Handyman.

The network, owned by Comcast Corp.'s NBCUniversal, last summer began digging deep into YouTube's analytics and found unexpected patterns. It turns out that some clips had taken on lives of their own, generating an inordinate amount of views, shares, comments and likes in relation to their popularity on TV.

Telemundo soon found out that these videos potentially represented new audiences and new revenue opportunities.

Today, Telemundo has over 1.1 million YouTube subscribers; it added 613,000 new subscribers from January through October of last year as a result of actively programming its channel.

And it all started with a particular clip from the telenovela "Marido en Alquiler," which translates in English to "My Dear Handyman."

You see, " Marido en Alquiler" ran on Telemundo's linear TV network from mid-2013 to early 2014, and it was a solid but not spectacular hit, said Peter Blacker, NBCUniversal's executive vice president for digital media and emerging business, Hispanic enterprises and content. The show chronicles the love life of Griselda Carrasco, who supports her family as a handyman--and ends up winning the lottery.

During its run, Telemundo started regularly posting recaps to its YouTube channel to help people catch up and hopefully watch the next episode on TV.

"We thought, 'we are not really going to be able to retain or attract audiences on YouTube,'" Mr. Blacker recalled. "Some of these shows have 150 hours of content."

Indeed, out of context, it's awfully hard to catch up on such serialized telenovelas from a short video or two. "But we started seeing these clusters of audience around different parts of clips," he said.

Most of the show recap clips generate a few thousand to a few hundred thousand views. But fans have responded in a big way to a particular clip from " My Dear Handyman" that was posted on Aug. 4 2013.

The 15-minute video begins innocently enough, with the handyman in question--a woman dressed in overalls and a blue hat which only mildly obscure her beauty--talking to a male acquaintance about her modest upbringing.

But around the 8-minute mark in the Handyman clip, a different couple enters into an illicit, particularly racy love scene, at least by network TV standards. It turns out that viewers were regularly jumping to this point in the video, talking about it, sharing it and looking for other clips featuring these characters or even other shows starring the actors.

"The comments we were seeing are about the talent and less about our shows," said Mr. Blacker.

So Telemundo started promoting such moments like the Handyman tryst, adding thumbnails--promotional messages that appear on top of videos. The network's analytics team now monitors these clips' performance and sometimes swaps out thumbnails in real time. It helps that Telemundo owns most of its shows, so it can basically carve up its linear content however it wants, said Mr. Blacker.

Telemundo has now taken the same approach with 100 such clips, promoting them enough to drive each past the million view mark. But none have matched the Handyman snippet, which now boasts over 25.8 million views. "What this has become for us is a new talent-based approach to linear storytelling," said Mr. Blacker.

These maneuvers have helped turn YouTube into a budding revenue source for Telemundo. The network won't say how big the business is, but Mr. Blacker said "It's significant enough (to have its) own line item in my business plan."

Write to Mike Shields at mike.shields@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 02, 2016 06:14 ET (11:14 GMT)

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