Stills and logos for two Sun Originals shows: No Parental Guidance and Tactics Exposed
The Sun has grown its video operation “even more aggressively” than planned in the past year.
It has grown its video team from around 25 people to about 80 and at the time of writing was still hiring for roles including showbiz producer , Fabulous producer , senior sports video producer , senior producer on Royal Exclusive , and channel manager for Sun News Video .
Total video views to Sun content were up 140% in 2025 compared to the year before, reaching 9.1 billion. December was its biggest ever month with 1.2 billion views.
- At the start of last year The Sun
- hired director of video Jon Lloyd
- and began to implement a
- video strategy based around two pillars
- Originals (sponsorable episodic formats in genres like lifestyle and sport) and News (short breaking news videos and long-form news shows on topics like royals and defence).
Since then it has racked up 214 million video views from its Sun Originals formats and reports a 110% increase in returning viewers.
It has tried out about 25 original formats in the past year, with about 19 of them live at the moment. Half of the formats have been sponsored, which Lloyd said was “way above even our expectations”.
Sun head of video: We learned it’s ‘about building really engaged communities’
Lloyd, who had never worked at a legacy publisher before but ran his own content agency and was behind TV content formats like Come Dine With Me and Four in a Bed, said he had joined The Sun to grow its reputation and reach.
“I think we are now known as a leader in premium quality video formats, which is great. That’s a huge step for us.”
He argued that “anyone can go out and get views” with enough time and money, but building a “really engaged community” is harder.
The key, Lloyd said, has been “finding a niche, build a community, and the rest will follow. We don’t go out there going ‘we’ve got to make that because we’re going to sell it’. We go out going ‘that’s an amazing community that we can grow, and we know that the brands will come’.”
He said that as a result of the new formats, brands are sponsoring Sun videos that had never worked with News UK before.
Sun director of video Jon Lloyd. Picture: News UK
The strategy is to build a “hero show” that lives on Youtube and is often up to around 20 minutes in length. Clips are cut for other platforms, including Tiktok and Instagram, as well as The Sun’s website and app.
The Sun has the biggest Youtube following of any UK newspaper brand, with 6.37 million subscribers on its main channel (The Telegraph is just behind on 6.08 million) and 7.5 million across all its accounts.
No Parental Guidance launched in July hosted by two mum influencers, who Lloyd described as “very Fabulous in tone” (referring to The Sun’s women’s lifestyle section).
Lloyd said the show’s Instagram account reached about 30,000 followers within a month and is now up to 55,000 “highly engaged followers who not only consume the content and watch a show, but they give us the content, they tell us what they want to talk about”. It has now totalled more than 16 million views.
He added: “No Parental Guidance as a community is a brilliant example of what has really worked: highly engaged, massive watch time, huge clickthrough rate, massive across social.”
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As well as their social presence, the hosts write a parenting column in the Fabulous magazine and they plan to start doing live events. Lloyd said it is “much more than just the show” and that this is a good example of The Sun’s new “360 content model”.
He explained: “We do have a lot of stuff that goes video first, AI transcribed into text, journos work their magic, turn it into articles. We might put out video first. We might put out digital first. We might hold for print. But those decisions are made as a three way point now.”
Sun Sport has also proved a “massive success”, Lloyd said, led by football show Tactics Exposed (now at more than 40 million views over 100 episodes).
It appears to be connecting The Sun’s sport coverage with a new audience. Comments have included: “Can’t believe I am subscribing to a Sun Sport channel, that’s how good you guys are. Super objective, keep it up.” and “The fact that this is The Sun and they have upped their game so much is almost hypnotising. Mad respect, established media should take notes.”
It also found a new revenue opportunity in boxing with No Glove Lost (30 million views so far). Lloyd said: “Everybody said to us ‘you won’t get boxing content sponsored’. And we said ‘don’t care’. We can make a great show. So we created something called No Glove Lost. It was sponsored on the second show on an ad-hoc basis, and it’s now just been picked up by DAZN for an entire year.”
The past year has involved a lot of testing of thumbnails, monitoring clickthrough rates, tweaking headlines and altering the actual cut of a video if there’s a high drop-off rate, Lloyd said.
“What do you do with a legacy brand who used to go ‘we’ve got an article, can you put some video in it’? Sometimes we were putting in below par video. We don’t do that anymore. It’s got to have a quality to it.”
Sun news video: Resource pivoted to longer formats
Lloyd said The Sun has learned mid-length videos about news (between about two minutes and eight minutes) are harder to make work.
“On Youtube there is no secret that news struggles and has been doing for a long time,” he said.
“We made two major pivots. The first one was into long-form content. We’re not an always-on broadcaster. We’re not Times Radio or Talksport. We don’t have an endless supply of content. So we do have to balance resource that we have versus how well the output does. So we pivoted a lot of our resource to news formats.”
A military analysis strand called Battle Plans Exposed on The Sun’s main Youtube channel has a “really long watch time”, Lloyd said. “Much better for revenue, audience comments and engagement through the roof.” Its biggest video so far was “EXPOSED: Putin loses 1500 troops after Ukraine’s AUDACIOUS advance” with 671,000 views.
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The Sun has also launched Superpowers Exposed and revived Frontline, hosted by defence editor Jerome Starkey. More long-form news formats are coming, Lloyd added.
These are produced alongside short-form news videos that can be quickly turned around to accompany Sun stories or go out across its social channels.
Big royal bet ‘tripled lifetime revenue in six weeks’
The second news video pivot that took place last year was moving royal content, including the flagship weekly Royal Exclusive show, off The Sun’s main Youtube channel onto its own account.
Lloyd explained they felt it was being “throttled” by being on the main account: “Our audience is very male on that main Youtube channel, and want war, want breaking news, and then royals would come along, and was skewed so female, and a lot of US, and it was like you’ve got two different audiences here.
“So we looked at the data, predicted a revenue loss and started royals as its own channel. We predicted we’d have a revenue loss for about six months while we built the new channel . Within six weeks, we tripled the revenue that royals had ever made on a channel with six and a half million subscribers.”
Several royal documentaries have now appeared on the channel alongside Royal Exclusive, with the first ( about Harry and Meghan ) receiving 1.6 million views.
“If you believe that the community is there, take the risk,” Lloyd advised.
Although shows like Battle Plans Exposed and Royal Exclusive may feel like Sun Originals formats, they are not monetised in the same way. News formats are monetised via Youtube’s revenue share instead of brand deals.
Lloyd explained: “If it’s Originals, it’s incredibly brand safe, and it’s built for brand integration and sponsorship…
“There is always going to be a challenge as a publisher and a producer where, if our wonderful royals team or news team are breaking a story that is about the royals, and then over here you’ve got a glossy show and the brand goes ‘oh, can you keep it really nice about the royals?’ Well, no, we’ve got to be able to do our reporting job.
“So it will take a certain type of brand, and I believe it will come in time, but it’s not a short-term play for us.”
Although platforms like Tiktok and Instagram are harder to monetise without brand deals, Lloyd said it is “old fashioned if we say everything has to make money immediately. It’s about revenue sources – where can it drive that can earn us money in the future?
“But I’d much rather have a highly engaged audience ready to earn revenue with later on than bash stuff out just to make a couple of quid here, but with no mid or long-term strategy.”
‘Madness and genius’ of Sun making documentaries
The Sun is now planning to launch new channels including one that Lloyd described as “a Gen Z channel using Gen Z hosts, Gen Z topics”.
Another new strand will be about true crime using stories from its newsrooms in London, Scotland, Ireland and the US.
“We are sitting on a treasure trove of some of the biggest crime stories ever that we’re now retelling and delivering the exclusive information,” Lloyd said.
But not all stories will be revisited via a 20-minute recap: some are being made into longer documentaries for example if they have hundreds of hours of never-seen-before footage.
Last year The Sun made a 40-minute documentary about missing girl Madeleine McCann with “unseen evidence” and, in a first for the publisher, licensed it to Channel 4 for what Lloyd described as a “very strong revenue opportunity”.
It later put out its own version on its platforms and won the Online Video prize at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Awards , praised for “marrying new revelations with visually compelling storytelling”.
Lloyd said The Sun is not “planning to turn ourselves into a documentary factory who sells stuff to the streamers and to terrestrial channels” but that it does have a “couple of mega docs in the making at the moment”. “This is the madness and the genius of this place,” he said.
Sun journalists being trained to become creators
Although The Sun is working with external creators on some of its shows it is also training up its existing journalists to build their own social presences.
The likes of Bizarre showbiz editor Ellie Henman and head of sport and Tactics Exposed host Dean ‘Deano’ Scoggins have undergone training via an internal creator content programme.
The programme helps the journalists come up with their own style and formats. Henman delivers breaking or exclusive news while walking around The Sun’s office and other locations, while Scoggins provides an ad hoc tactics analysis using Tic Tacs.
Lloyd said a group of about five journalists initially had generated 36 million views on their own platforms over the past three months as well as a further 21 million back to The Sun by linking their videos to the main Sun accounts. Ten more journalists were inducted in early February.
“We’re now going to do more showbiz, we’re going to do more sport, we’re going to do politics, we’re going to do news reporting and breaking news reporting in this style,” Lloyd said.
Lloyd said it is important to make the most of both the Sun brand and its individual creators.
“It’s not about doing one or the other,” Lloyd said. “If there was one word of the year, it’s been diversification.”
Over the next year, Lloyd said, The Sun is planning to increase its overall video output by 30%.
“If you think how far we’ve grown in a year, that is a mad amount,” he said. “So it’s more channels, it’s more communities, it’s more premium quality formats.”
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