The FT does not believe video is the panacea for publishers, instead pinning its hopes on speed and personalisation
The Financial Times has stripped its site of third-party software and rebuilt it from the bottom up, focusing on personalisation in the hope this will boost user engagement. This is what the FT believes will get ease it through a tough publishing market, instead of pinning all hopes on video.
Financial Times
The site has been developed with two key features in mind; speed and personalisation. Rather than structuring the site around a traditional editorial hierarchy of content, stories are presented in topics, with each user choosing what they want to see, how and when they want to be notified, all of which is collated into a personalised MyFT feed.
That said, the publisher is keen to preserve the value of editorial curation, both out of reader demand to have experts curating the news and to ensure customers are served with the news they need to know but may not choose to follow.
The new website also gives greater prominence to opinion and analysis, a move synonymous with The Times' similar decision to push its expertise in analysis, opinion and commentary, and away from breaking news.
Ad formats
A significant part of the site's upheaval has been a move away from standard advertising formats, which prevent the site from being fully responsive. Ad blocking is putting a lot of pressure on publishers to find less intrusive ways of making money, but Bede McCarthy, director of product at the FT, said that publishers chasing scale “are competing with some pretty big players in the market”, adding “we are insignificant in the face of the volume that Facebook and Google and others see”.
Instead, the publisher has employed the ‘less is more’ approach, developing a few responsive ad formats that fit harmoniously within editorial “rather than building a responsive website and sticking some ads on it” and, critically, are low latency. The site also incorporates new advertising formats including in-stream positions.
The newly designed high-impact responsive formats, coupled with the FT’s paid posts, is what McCarthy claimed is “the fertile ground” in the new site over programmatic buying, which he doesn’t believe will take over direct-sold any time soon.
While mobile has played an important role in the development of these formats, McCarthy said scaling down to mobile is a challenge publishers still need to overcome since “people still have desktop-esque expectations” of advertising and features. “You don’t have that many options with mobile advertising”, he added.
Speed
The FT claims the new site is “one of the fastest news sites in the world on both desktop and mobile”. Users can start reading in 1.5 seconds on desktop devices, and 2.1 seconds on mobile, it boasted.
To do this, the FT stripped back all tools and technology on its site and built it from scratch, recognising that the main culprit of slow load times on sites is ad technology.
The arrival of auditing tools has helped publishers understand just how many third parties are inserting lines of code on their website to derive knowledge on the audience the publishers themselves have invested in. The FT has used such tools to identify which third-party code is on its site, then conducted an audit.
It calculated the price of each new addition to the site, whether it was an analytics package, an ad tech platform, or marketing/CRM system, by translating the additional seconds of load time into cost in terms of revenue.
Marketing tools it deemed essential but were adding significant load time were built in-house to sit within the site, which McCarthy says is “more powerful”, rather than loading at the point at which the customer visits the site.
McCarthy says it was “a good time for us to have a clean out” ahead of the UK’s proposed data protection regulations that will come into play in 2018. “Publishers are going to have to raise their game in that area,” he adds.
Video
While many digital publishers are pinning their hopes on video advertising inventory to keep revenues afloat, McCarthy is less optimistic it will heal the wounds of print news publishers. Earlier this year, a Reuters report on online news video showed in a range of 30 online news sites, only around 2.5 per cent of average visit time is spent on video pages; 97.5 per cent of time is still spent with text.
“If you look at it through that lens then it is not a massive growth opportunity. This is customer behaviour we are talking about. Although there is a big trend online for people to consume more video, I don’t know if that is translating across to news,” he says.
“We do invest in video, we have a video studio, but I think it is part of a strategy, not a strategy. I don’t think video is the solution for publishers, I think it is part of a solution.”
Engagement to drive subscriptions
The aim is to change consumer behaviour, in the hopes this will have a knock-on effect to drive subscriptions. To this end, the publisher has reset objectives for engagement, deciphering what is quality viewing and readership as opposed to page impressions. To do this, it looks at how recently a user visited, how often they visit and how much content they consume when they do. In rich journalism - videos and features - it looks at average playtime on a video, how much of an article they read.
The publisher claims the new site increases engagement by up to 30 per cent. The site’s focus on increasing engagement also supports the cost-per-hour (CpH) advertising metric pioneered by the FT.
At this time, McCarthy sees the site as a “platform for experimentation”, with opportunity to use the responsive web to move customers between its main site, events business and financial publishing titles. “Through that we will be better at tying events business to our content business” he says.