News.com.au gets revamp, with News Corp saying it will benefit brands and consumers
News Corp’s news.com.au has unveiled a new homepage as part of a revamp that will see the entire site being updated over the next six months.
The site, which recorded an audience of 9.8m last month according to the Nielsen Digital Ratings, has seen a change in ad placements, and hopes to offer a simplified layout and an improved user experience.
General manager of news.com.au, Melissa Overman, said the new, cleaner, site would benefit both consumers and brands.
“Today we launch a refreshed news.com.au desktop homepage as part of an ongoing product evolution program. The improved user experience provides readers with a new simplified, clean and wide screen format.
“The page has been built to improve performance and support increased consumer browser habits on larger format screens. It looks great and importantly has been created to offer a premium and more immersive reader experience, which will in turn lift engagement on the site.
“Growing market demands on viewability means we need to deliver inventory of the highest value to our clients. The new homepage includes adhesive, position one, ad formats which achieve 80% or more in viewability metrics, along with streamlined ad formats. We’ve boosted support for our native product with additional placements to drive audience growth for News Native Networks content.
“With consumer behaviour changing, in terms of people wanting to go directly to the source versus the sideways trend of consumption, we felt that it was the right time to enhance the site for our consumers and advertisers.”
News.com.au editor-in-chief Kate de Brito added that the new site would help readers of news.com.au find the content they want.
“News.com.au has been the number one news website in Australia for 39 consecutive months. We have maintained this leadership position by catering to our readers’ huge appetite for breaking news, politics, entertainment, finance and lifestyle content.
“A third of our readers come directly to the news.com.au homepage multiple times a day, making news.com.au a habitual, must-read destination for more than 9.8m readers every month. To continue to evolve to meet the needs of our audience, this homepage refresh is the next step in helping our readers find the news they want, when they want it.”
Oh good – more/bigger ads! That’ll go a long way towards improving user experience…..
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The News.com.au branding really gets lost with such a logo heavy and busy ad execution as shown in the above picture, hoping there are some guidelines to create some consistency of adverts in the face of users.
It looks like the distribution rate of ad pixels to content may be off balance, less is often more with advertising placements.
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A new record for ad display latency?
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I read news.com.australia everyday. I just wanted to offer feedback as a user. Site worked great when I first started following, then once the ads became more aggressive, not so well, page will not load properly until all the ads have loaded, every time you go back to homepage after reading an article, the same thing happens. You go to select an article, and ads suddenly pushing things around means wrong articles load, then going back to homepage things skip around, so you have to wait quite a time for ads to load so you can insure the article you touch is the one that loads, quite often i have to exit the site and load again because of the glitching. I love the writers, they’re all great, I also love the old layout, its simple and clean, despite the adds, I just hope that your new improved site will address the issue of how much the ads glitch the site out, and I will be happy!!
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..turns adblocker on…
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