Web Site of the Year

BusinessWeek

Audience engagement boosts traffic

By Warren S.Hersch
National President
Senior Editor, National Underwriter Life & Health

Digital journalism isn’t just about providing content for multimedia. To be effective, that content has to actively engage readers, drawing them into discussions with B2B reporters and editors, and with each other.

So said BusinessWeek.com Technology & Science Channel editor Tom Giles during the Web Site of the Year presentation at ASBPE’s Digital Symposium last month. 

“Today, context is just as important as content,” said Giles. “At BusinessWeek.com, we’re evolving niche communities, organized around individual interests, to keep readers engaged as they delve deeply into the subjects that are important to them. They’re coming to our site not only to read what our staff reporters and editors are writing; they also want to know what other readers are saying.” 

At last count, Giles said, unique monthly visitors stood at 10.2 million, up from 6.4 million in 2006. Monthly page views total 50.4 million, a 20.3% rise over the 41.9 million recorded in 2006. 

Among the site’s most widely accessed links are video and podcast feeds, which nab, respectively, more than 500,000 and 820,000 visitors a month. A new BusinessWeek.com Mobile Edition for Web-enabled phones gets 100,000 monthly downloads.

How to account for these large numbers? Certainly BusinessWeek has tapped the long-time brand loyalty of its 4.8 million-plus print readers. But Giles said much credit goes to the substantial investments in online staff and technology made in recent years.

BusinessWeek.com currently has a dedicated team of about 30 writers, Giles said. That’s in addition to the 150 print reporters who regularly feed stories to the Web site. The online staff also provides material for their print magazine counterparts.

“For the ‘Technology’ channel, for example, I have access to a half-dozen BusinessWeek magazine reporters,” he added. “I also have a staff of five of my own people, who write first and foremost for online, but also for the magazine,” he said.

Since 2006, BusinessWeek.com also has revamped its design. Visitors to the site find links to leading stories under “News & Analysis” and “More Business News” sections in the center of the home page. The top articles are often accompanied by a slide show and video clip.

Interactive features highlighted

Along the home page’s left side are sections for “Stocks” and “Market Summary,” the latter recapping the performance of leading market indicators such as the S&P 500 and NASDAQ. Midway down the site is an animated scroll bar that flashes across the screen pictures and captions to several popular interactive user features.

Most stories on the site, said Giles, are now consolidated under six “channels” — Finance, Technology, Innovation, Management, Small Business, and Global — topics readers are most interested in. They are accessed via a top horizontal navigation bar. 

Giles’ responsibility, the Technology section, provides links to content in a variety of presentation forms in 11 subsections at the bottom.

While BusinessWeek.com has enjoyed a sportier look and a beefier budget and staff than in prior years (staffing and budgets remain to be seen given the recent buyout of the publication by Bloomberg), Giles said the site would not have become the major hub it now is for business content had the editorial team not taken steps to draw traffic.

Search yields traffic

One step was to invest substantially in making the site search friendly. While BusinessWeek.com is the destination for a growing number of readers (up 20% over 2006), many others first learn about articles using search. Indeed, observed Giles, the search engines have become so integral to marketing strategy that BW is displacing AOL, MSN, and Yahoo business portals.

“The percentage of our page views that are driven by search engines is up 45% over last four years. By contrast, traffic coming by way of the portals is down 15%,” he said.

“The search engines are increasingly critical to drawing traffic to our site. And so how we write our headlines and decks is of utmost importance.”

Aggregating content works

Another component of the site’s strategy is Business Exchange. Launched in September 2008 as a sister site (see Editor’s Notes, June/July 2009), Business Exchange is a community-driven platform that aggregates news, blog posts, and features around the Web that relate to any of the nearly 1,600-plus topics accessible on the site. Though Business Exchange relied on heavy staff involvement at the start — editors curated a core group of topics in which they held expertise — much of the current content, said Giles, is driven by its community of readers.

That community is growing. The sister site now claims more than 32,000 registered users. The most active topic, social networking, currently boasts more than 4,700 new articles and 490-plus users. To encourage reader engagement, Business Exchange sports a “Featured User” box for the individual who has contributed the largest number of posts to a particular topic; and a “What’s Your Idea” section where readers can suggest stories for the magazine.

Story from the November/December 2009 issue of ASBPE’s newsletter.

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