In The Know by Yahoo’s objective was simple: Highlight social activism across multiple sectors, from sustainability to inclusivity, celebrating and amplifying remarkable individuals and innovations that are often neglected by mainstream media.
In The Know’s social activism coverage is represented in the Changemakers category. In 2021, In The Know's changemakers content was viewed a total of 76M times. The changemakers category includes LGBTQIA+, Black Stories, Latinx Stories, APAHM Stories, Native Stories, and Disability Stories produced by the video and editorial creators.
As part of In The Know’s monthly content initiatives, the team seeks to highlight between 10 and 15 changemakers, entrepreneurs and community leaders in order to spotlight their accomplishments for the In The Know: Honors program. During 2021, In The Know was able to feature 93 people across a diverse spectrum of identities who are bettering their communities and the world through innovation and advocacy.
Our goals were centered on both impact and engagement, focusing on the Gen Z audience and delivering stories that speak to young audiences, showcasing diverse perspectives from the voices they care about most.
To showcase changemakers content, ITK leveraged social media and our on-platform site to bring our audience a unique cross-channel entertainment experience on InTheKnow.com that integrates commerce, culture and content.
Since In The Know’s inception, our producer-editors have been empowered to share and track their own content directly across our vast library of social channels. This allows the team to respond to trends quickly and efficiently, while also empowering our day-of producer-editors with first-hand knowledge about what’s performing with our audience. We also measure the halo effect of our content. As a growth tactic, we also decided to add original narration to all of the videos we post. This original narration helps connect our viewers to the story while also giving us a chance to provide a secondary deeper storyline.
Content initiatives for 2021 celebrated Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Asain Pacific American Heritage Month, Pride, Caribbean American Heritage Month, Disability Pride, Body Acceptance, Latinx Heritage Month, Native American Heritage Month and more.
With nearly 10 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, In The Know publishes relevant content to spark conversations about underrepresented topics showcasing diverse perspectives on Black Stories, Latinx Stories, Disability Stories, LGBTQIA+ Stories, Native Stories, AAPI Stories and more.
Optimizing content for multiple platforms presents many challenges. From re-editing clips to resurfacing top performing content, we have had to develop our own unique content management system in order to ensure that our audience sees our content across multiple platforms.
In The Know by Yahoo’s explosive growth is a marker of our achievements on social media. We grew to 21.2M ComScore unique views per month over 19M in 2021, making our site larger than Refinery29, Bustle and Complex.
The In The Know network averages 5.4 million unique active users per month. We have successfully reached our viewership goals with an average of 1 billion cross-platform video views per month. Additionally, we have grown our TikTok substantially over the past year from 35,000 followers to 1 million followers at the time of this entry, with 24.8 million likes.
Changemakers content in particular earned over 38.8M views, and over 31M views for LGBTQIA+, Black and Latin Stories in particular.
The success of our video and editorial content has extended In The Know’s social activism efforts to live event series with Latinx changemakers with plans to hold events for Black Changemakers, Asian Pacific American Changemakers and Native Changemakers.
