Newsweek.com redesign fuelled by social media, Amazon cloud and WCM
Guest editorial by Laura Kempke
Visits to pages on Newsweek.com naturally mean revenue for the publication from advertisers. So not only does Newsweek need to drive traffic, but it's motivated to keep visitors there by making the articles, photos and video for which the publication is known easy to find and presenting them alongside other appealing content. To that end, the team at Newsweek.com made the site easy to navigate not only from the home page, but from any page-backward and forward through image galleries and to other parts of the site. At the same time, a clean new look immediately focuses visitors on a few stories.
"The technology allows the business to grow in ways that had been holding it back," says Geoff Reiss, vice president and general manager of Newsweek Digital. He explains that Newsweek created amazing content over time, but because of the way it was published and organized, "less than 15 percent of that content was discoverable through organic search." The relaunch of Newsweek.com meant the reintroduction of about 70,000 items of content that had effectively been lost to site visitors.
The most popular articles at any given time aren't from the vault, though-they're stories, video and images linked to on social networks like Digg, Facebook and Twitter and on MSN. Reiss calls Newsweek.com a "peak-driven site. When we produce a piece of content that hits in the marketplace," he says, "it really hits. We need to be able to serve hundreds of thousands of consumers an hour." Moreover, traffic isn't predictable or necessarily tied to events.
To present more content and make it searchable, Newsweek went with a new web content management system. To promote the content, they're using social media and prominently presenting the icons that let people share with their own friends or networks using Facebook, Twitter and Digg. And to soak up the surges in traffic caused by stepped up use of social technologies, Newsweek is using Amazon cloud services. This allows them to do things like run "100 Places to Remember Before They Disappear," which drove 34 million page views in a day, compared to the few million that are more typical, without buying and maintaining more IT infrastructure. Reiss estimates this will save Newsweek about half a million dollars a year.
In addition to pulling in more visitors with the revamped site, Newsweek built its platform to allow the quick creation of microsites like "100 Places"-sites that go into depth on a particular topic. They can draw substantial traffic above and beyond the norm for Newsweek.com and act as a vehicle for more advertising. Newsweek designed and built its first microsite hosted on the new technology, a look back at the last decade called "Newsweek 20/10," in less than two months. When it went live in November 2009, it got about a million page views an hour, underscoring the importance of extra capacity in the cloud.
Next up for Newsweek? Tailoring its content platform for viewing on mobile devices like the iPad, continuing to grow ad revenues by increasing traffic through integration with social technologies, and saving money by locating the whole application in the cloud.
As a vice president at Schwartz Communications, Laura Kempke leads the company's business software practice, which formulates and implements media, blog and analyst strategies for companies with offerings for finance, sales and marketing, customer care and other business functions. Kempke also heads the agency’s writing program and is an active member of the new media group. Newsweek is a client of Day Software, a provider of web content management (WCM) software.