Let’s talk about Product Vision and Strategy for 24sata
As stated in the previous story History lessons strategies and visions can change over time, they must adapt, and they have to a beacon for the whole organization to align efforts in the same direction.
What is the Product?
Of course. Content is king. Still. Our main product is news and the quality of product largely depends on how the editorial team discovers, produces and distributes content. That is where our value proposition sits.
That said it’s not unimportant how your content is presented to the user, the experience, design, the level of engagement, speed… And that is a matter of product development…
The product has to be linked to your business model: and it’s still digital advertising, mostly. Our clients for the adverts shown to the users in the form of impressions and clicks. Still 24sata is not a subscription business, not that, one day, we will not go down that road.
Product vision
Are we different, and how? Consider our brand image? How are we going to be different than all the other media?
Imagine, 24sata just walked into a bar, what would he look like, a good looking guy, beard of no beard, what attitude would he have, what kind of language would he use, loud or soft voice, t-shirt or necktie?
Well, here what we came up with:
24sata is diverse in content presentation, rich and emotionally packed tabloid that the user should consume with the utmost simplicity and optimization for speed.
We want to be a digital only news destination that excels in variety of content, and is an expert in recognizing and understanding what is of interest to the individual user in order to create a healthy daily habit of using our products for the largest possible audience that will secure our business goals.
We want to win at breaking news whenever we can, and in a fast changing world of information we shall not compromise on giving the user the reporting that is packed with clarity, emotion and multimedia and always having in mind the user’s best interest, and secondly in the interest of our business goals.
We want to create a experience that promotes direct relationship and communication with the user to boost engagement and user generated content.
Metrics
Certain strategies can only take you so far. We believe it is time to move on from reach strategy to focus more on the quality and loyalty of the user’s visits to our content.
Revenue per user
That brings us to our overall business metrics untill now. Since we are still advertising based or clients are going to interested in reach (almost 70 percent of overall users in Croatia, Gemius), and of course, revenue from advertising which we have done pretty well in the last few years.
Average session duration
Most important metrics are the ones showing the time users spend with our platforms. The minutes and the seconds they are willing to spend with us and not Facebook, YouTube, Netflix or some of our competitors.
Sessions per user & Pages per session
Another indicator of the satisfaction of a user is retention. How many times a week do they return (visits) and volume of these visits.
That is how we can then set benchmarks on loyal users and fly-byes.
Now that we have defined Product, Metrics and Vision we can talk about what are going to be the focus areas of the redesign:
1. A unified experience on all platforms
Unified User Experience on all platforms: There is no reason why we should have completely different experiences on web, mobile and apps as is the case right now.
It is very hard to control and optimize such a product and usually one of the platforms is left behind. Like our apps. Which we haven’t touched significantly in a few years and that’s just sad.
The product people are looking forward to it. Now we will have the same design framework, style guide, same API’s for delivering the information…
Speed. Single Page Applications and micro services architecture puts our development efforts right in the middle of the latest trends in web design. The ultimate goal of this change is to have a faster site for the end-user.
2. New content types
As we will show in the next story we intend to present new formats to boost the diversity and variety of content and user engagement:
Video article
Gallery article
Flash article
Long-form article
Live and Sport text articles
Column article
Native and PR articles
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2. Machine Learning
One of the crucial pillars for this Reinvent project is the use of machine learning.
We have three product in mind here: Tag recommendations, Contextual recommendations and we are testing Personalized homepage and article pages.
3. Automation
The idea is to relieve the editors of having to edit more that 23 articles on the homepage. On all other section pages only 5 articles will be manually edited and the rest will be automated based of prior performance of the content.
4. Video
Our video strategy is very important for retaining users and keep them on the site longer. That’s why we will continue to invest heavily in new content and types of articles that make viewing video easy and accessible.
5. Aggregation
As it was part of the brand from the start finding good stories online and providing a link to the sources is also a part of our editorial process. We will make this easy with a new type of article — Flash card.
6. User Engagement
We are introducing new ways of interactions for the users. Comments will be shown on the homepage, users they will have option of reactions on articles and following topics that are of interest. They will get notifications on subject they choose the follow. With all that we will keep Crosswords and Sudoku, Horoscope and Weather, Nik Titanik and Girl of the day.
7. Traffic management
Being a large site 24sata has the option to distribute traffic and we will make improvement on handling the traffic exchange and automate it as much as possible.
8. New monetization strategies and more visible inventory
Implementing a new Data Management Platform we will be able to provide a better results for clients in terms of segmentation both on display, native and PR inventories. Focus will be on providing better results and visibility of ads on all the platforms with having a similar ad structure on all platforms.
Read more on the Design that is going to bring all this to life in the next article…
