MSNBC.com Racks Up Traffic, Relaunches
- by March 7, 2004
The site's heavy-hitting branded partners--which include the Washington Post Co.'s Washingtonpost.com.Newsweek Interactive and Newsweek, NBC's Nightly News, Dateline, and the Today Show, and the Financial Times--are helping aggregate audiences while also attracting advertising dollars. As of February, MSNBC.com's ad revenue is up 50 percent year-over-year, and the site is "extremely close" to being cash-flow positive, according to Scott Moore, president-MSNBC.com.
Having recently unveiled its redesigned site, MSNBC.com on Tuesday launches the next phase in its overhaul--a revamp of the Today Show's Web presence that will feature exclusive content from the show's stars and contributors, a database of recipes, streaming video clips from the show, and a weekly e-newsletter. The goal: to offer a continuous, throughout-the-day presence for NBC's cash cow and ratings leader. Pulling Today's audience onto MSNBC.com is bound to jack up its numbers even more, making the site a must-buy for advertisers. NBC News president Neal Shapiro and Rick Kaplan, newly installed as head of MSNBC cable, are expected to make the scene on Tuesday to support MSNBC.com's public unveiling of the Today revamp.
MSNBC.com typically runs neck-and-neck against CNN.com. For example, in December of 2003, MSNBC.com racked up 19.6 million unique visitors, while CNN.com pulled in 19.9 million, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Audience powerhouse Yahoo! News lured 18.1 million unique visitors that month. In January, MSNBC.com attracted 20.7 million unique visitors, according to Nielsen data. MSNBC.com executives hope those numbers will only become more attractive to advertisers.
Moore says the site's redesign, the majority of which was completed in December, makes MSNBC.com more consumer-friendly, and also more advertiser-friendly. "There's more content and more video. We've given more prominence to our branded partners, and beefed up entertainment and health coverage," Moore says. In addition, there are improvements to site navigation and search functions, new personalization features, rejiggered page layouts, and even a new font.
Moore gives much of the credit for the site revamp to Dean Wright, MSNBC.com's editor-in-chief, who's held the top editorial post for a year. Wright returned to the Microsoft fold (he served as managing editor of news for four years and helped launch MSNBC.com) after a stint at Time Warner's America Online, where he helped oversee integration of Time Inc. magazine content into the AOL service. But prior to his career in online journalism, Wright worked as an editor and reporter at the Associated Press, and newspapers including The Baltimore Sun, The Louisville Courier-Journal, and The San Jose Mercury News.
Wright is a voracious magazine reader--Harper's, Entertainment Weekly, The Atlantic, Newsweek, and the print edition of The New York Times are among his favorite reads--and he finds time to make The Onion a regular part of his day. Originally from Tennessee, Wright's favorite author is Robert Penn Warren, another son of the south.
"My philosophy has been to really make this the best news site by working more effectively with our partners," says Wright. But that doesn't mean MSNBC.com isn't focused on producing original content; Wright has focused internal resources on health reporting, buffing election coverage, producing a pop culture blog, and entertainment fixtures. Wright expects to introduce even more targeted, original content this year, like an award-winning series a MSNBC.com reporter delivered on the subject of online fraud. And health: "It's an area where you just can't do enough--it's friendly to advertisers, and consumers are demanding as much information as possible," Wright adds.
MSNBC.com's recently concluded "Demo Derby" is an example of an original and entertaining fixture. The "Derby" chronicled Democratic candidates' primary battles, offering an eclectic summary featuring poll data, campaign fund raising tallies, delegate counts, and editors' unique takes on how the candidates were faring. Each candidate's face was emblazoned on top of a red, white, and blue donkey. On Jan. 16, Carol Moseley Braun was shown falling off her donkey as she withdrew from the Democratic primary race.
Moore, Wright's boss, credits the MSNBC.com's editor-in-chief with strengthening the site's ties with NBC and its other partners, and with being a calming influence in the newsroom--and actually, there are two--one in Redmond, Wash., Microsoft's homebase, the other in Secaucus, N.J. "Dean is a steady hand on the tiller. When he came in [a year ago] there had been several months where we had no editor [after Merrill Brown's departure]. The newsroom was a little jumpy," Moore recalls. "He did a very good job of calming people down, listening, and understanding issues. At the same time, he stripped away a lot of the hierarchy and dysfunction."
Charlie Tillinghast, the site's VP-business development, believes Wright has been successful in balancing breaking news coverage with stories that appeal to targeted interests such as entertainment, health, and sports. Wright's ability to balance the strategic importance of its partners' content with the need to create original content and programming is helping give MSNBC.com an edge.
"Dean has enhanced the appeal of MSNBC to a broader set of advertisers," Tillinghast comments. "Like other media, advertisers seek an editorial environment that creates positive associations with their brand," he adds, citing MSNBC.com's space coverage and photo essays as examples of hits.
"One of my goals is to increase the image to text ratio on our site. I think it provides us with exciting ways to tell stories that we can't tell with text," Wright explains. More imagery to be sure--streaming video is a huge priority for MSNBC.com and Microsoft's MSN Network. A streaming video product launched in early January as a cornerstone of MSN 9. For its part, MSNBC.com is averaging about 12 million streams served per day--spurred in part by heavy promotion on the MSN home page. "I've made a big effort to get as much video on our sites as possible--there are at least five video links on the cover of our site," Wright notes.
The power of streaming video was never more clear to those in the Web news business than it was in March of 2003 at the onset of the war in Iraq. MSNBC.com served nearly 75 million free video streams that month, according to internal logs. Microsoft and other broadband players are eager to jump-start the streaming video ad market. "The marketplace is changing; traditional marketers with major brands are realizing that the Internet's real. You can't ignore it," Moore says. "If you're a television advertiser, you absolutely have to be in this market or you're missing a huge opportunity. McDonald's, Procter & Gamble, and Revlon are among the advertisers that have run streaming video ads via MSN.
Of his year at the helm of MSNBC.com, Wright says he's been pleasantly surprised by his own realization that the Internet "isn't a niche business anymore, it's a mainstream business. When I first got into this business [back in 1996], that was not the case."
As for the future of Web journalism and publishing, Wright says: "I think the best thing we can do is to retire the term 'new media.' We're not 'new' anymore. This is a reliable mainstream news source."
