Every newsroom conversation about social media eventually lands on the same idea: invest more in video. Bigger crews, better editing and we will get more engagement. It sounds right. The problem is that video's biggest strength as a format, telling the whole story in one watch, is also what works against the one thing most publishers actually need from social media: getting the viewer to leave the platform and land on their website, where they are independent of algorithms.

An recent development with The New York Times, arguably the best-resourced newsroom in the world, added just 280,000 digital subscribers in Q2 2026, but that came in below analyst expectations, even as CEO Meredith Kopit Levien pointed to declining search and referral traffic while the company leaned harder into video and app-based consumption. The Reuters Institute's 2026 Digital News Report adds a sharper number: video consumption on publishers' own sites and apps has fallen five percentage points since 2025, and ten points since 2021, despite years of newsroom investment in producing it. And that's not because content it not being watched. Consumers are just finding it on social media, and not clicking to reveal the full story, or sometimes they even get the full story in their feed.

That's not a distribution problem. It's a mechanism problem, and there's real research behind why it happens.

Why does a headline make you want to click, but a video summary doesn't?

Because of what psychologists call the information gap. George Loewenstein's foundational 1994 theory of curiosity describes it simply: curiosity is triggered by an awareness of a gap between what you know and what you could know, and the brain wants that gap closed. Golman and Loewenstein later refined this, showing curiosity depends on there being a real, felt gap, not just an absence of information, but a noticed absence of information you now want.

A headline and image paired with an article works because it opens that gap without closing it. You see enough to know the topic matters and enough to sense there's more, but not enough to feel finished. A video that narrates the full story inside the post closes the gap before you ever leave the app. There's nothing left pulling you toward the article, because the video already delivered the resolution.

This isn't a theory pulled out of thin air for social posts. It's been tested directly on headlines, at scale, and the results are stark.

Does giving away more of the story in a post actually reduce clicks?

Yes, and the effect is large enough to reverse depending on how much is given away. A 2025 study published in Scientific Reports (Aubin Le Quéré and Matias, Cornell) analyzed 8,977 headline A/B tests drawn from a corpus of over 27,000 real-world experiments run by a major digital publisher. The researchers built a validated, continuous measure of "headline concreteness," essentially, how much of the story a headline gives away versus how much it leaves open.

The finding: when a headline was already fairly complete, giving away even more information significantly reduced click-through rates, by close to 10% in their upper-bound estimate. This pattern held for the majority of the headlines tested. Only headlines that started out too vague benefited from adding more detail. Past a certain point, the more concrete and "finished" the summary, the fewer people bothered to click through. The researchers describe this as a curvilinear relationship: too little information fails to spark curiosity, but too much information resolves it before anyone needs to click at all.

A video post is, functionally, the most "concrete" version of a story a publisher can put in a feed. It doesn't just describe the story, it narrates it, often with visuals, quotes, and a conclusion, all before the viewer leaves the platform. Per the same research, that's close to the exact condition under which giving more away costs you the click.

Why don't people feel like they're missing anything after watching a video summary?

A new perception called "news-finds-me", the belief that a person is staying sufficiently informed simply by scrolling their feed, without needing to actively seek out full articles (Gil de Zúñiga, Weeks, and Ardèvol-Abreu, 2017) is the reason why people already feel like they are "informed". Video reinforces that perception directly. It doesn't just inform you, it gives you the feeling of having gotten the whole story, complete with tone, pacing, and a sense of closure that a headline alone doesn't provide. That feeling is convenient for the viewer and costly for the publisher, because it removes the one thing that reliably drives exploratory clicks: the sense that something is still missing.

So is producing video for social reach still worth the cost?

That depends on what the video is for. If the goal is to be seen and to build a following on the platform itself, video can still work. If the goal is to drive people back to your own website, where your subscriptions, ads, and UTM-tracked revenue actually live, a format that structurally resolves curiosity before the click happens is working against that specific goal, and it isn't cheap to run.

Video production for social content runs $1,500 to $5,000 for something simple, and $4,500 to $20,000 for anything closer to broadcast quality, based on 2026 industry pricing data. Agencies quoting full video projects average $42,281 per project. A library of videos also needs ongoing upkeep: 20 to 30% require updates annually as facts or graphics change, at $2,000 to $5,000 per update. None of that includes the newsroom hours spent producing it, time that isn't being spent on the story itself, or on formats built to send people to read it.

Compare that to a format engineered to preserve the information gap instead of closing it: a branded image, a headline, and a link placed where it doesn't interrupt the scroll. Media Gridz automates exactly that, across six channels, for €30 a month. There's no editing, no shoot day, no per-video cost, and the format is doing the opposite job of a video summary: showing enough to be relevant, withholding enough to be worth a click.

How does this actually work in practice?

1. Connect your RSS feed, or a manual article URL, to Media Gridz.

2. The platform automatically generates a branded post using your article's image and headline, structured to inform without resolving the story.

3. Posts publish automatically across your connected channels, with UTM tracking built into every link so you can see exactly which platform and post is driving the click.

4. Insights shows you which headlines and formats are actually pulling people through to the site, so you can refine what keeps the information gap open instead of guessing.

FAQ

Does this mean video has no place in a newsroom's strategy? No. It means video built to summarize a story inside the feed works against click-through by design. Video built as its own product, something people go to your site or app specifically to watch, is a different investment with a different goal, and isn't covered by this mechanism.

Isn't more information in a post always better for the audience? Not for driving clicks. The Scientific Reports meta-analysis found that once a headline (or, by extension, a post) already conveys enough of the story, adding more detail measurably lowers click-through. There's a point where "helpful" tips into "there's nothing left to check out."

Can Media Gridz publish video? Media Gridz can only publish your custom videos, but not generate video content for you. Today, Media Gridz automates branded image-based distribution across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Pinterest, and X, formats built to preserve the information gap rather than close it.

What if we've already invested in a video production budget? Worth asking what the video is actually meant to do. If it's meant to build audience and reputation on the platform itself, that's a legitimate, separate goal. If it's meant to be monetized, the research suggests the format needs to leave something out, not summarize everything, so you can get that audience back to your website and monetize where you ROI is the highest.

Summary

Research on information gap theory (Loewenstein, 1994; Golman & Loewenstein, 2015) shows curiosity requires an unresolved gap between known and knowable information. A 2025 Scientific Reports meta-analysis of 8,977 headline A/B tests (Aubin Le Quéré & Matias, Cornell) found a curvilinear relationship between headline concreteness and click-through rate: once a headline is already sufficiently concrete, additional detail reduces click-through by up to 9.9% in high-concreteness conditions. Video posts, which narrate a complete story within the feed, function as maximally concrete content and are structurally more likely to satisfy curiosity without a click, consistent with "news-finds-me" perception research (Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2017). Media Gridz automates branded, gap-preserving image-based post distribution across six social channels for €30/month, versus $1,500 to $42,000+ per video production.

Ready to publish posts built to earn the click, not replace it? Start free with Media Gridz