Hearst’s Digital Strategy: ‘From Laggard to Leapfrog’
Yesterday morning, we sat down with Chris Johnson, VP of digital media at Hearst, to discuss the success of his company’s decision to move its magazine brands to standalone Web sites. While some may quibble with Hearst’s online strategy — Johnson admitted there was a “quiet period” from 2002-2004 — the exec believes the future looks bright.
“We had a quick period of playing catch-up as we launched the sites,” Johnson said. “But I think from the moment that they launched, we put ourselves on a different playing field than the rest of the magazine companies, from a traffic generation standpoint, from a back-end technology standpoint, from a strategy standpoint. The true integration we have between the digital media group and the magazine edit and ad sales teams is very different than what any of the other magazine publishers have.”
“We were lucky,” Johnson continued. “We had the opportunity to rebuild an entire digital media infrastructure in 2006 with state of the art open source databases, content management system and in-house developers. We learned from the lessons that we’d seen in the space for the last 10 or 15 years. We’d seen people throwing a lot of money into vendors, throwing a lot of money into things they could maybe do cheaper and better themselves.”
Going forward, Hearst will focus on developing communities online. The company has built two widgets for Facebook and is working with outside developers on creating additional ones to roll out across the pages of the 10 magazines currently on the social networking site.
The recent acquisition of Answerology, a Q&A platform designed to work on different sites, was a key purchase in the community-building strategy. “We had a big hole in community,” Johnson said. “We had worked with three or four vendors and outsourced a lot of our community features. It just felt like that wasn’t right. A bolt-on community is still a bolt-on community. You still want to own and operate it. Filling a hole in our community strategy was absolutely critical, I think our No. 1 priority for the year.”
But are there more acquisitions in the future?
“Yes, absolutely,” Johnson said. “Hearst is both opportunistic and strategic in evaluating acquisitions. There are multiple groups at Hearst that are acquisitive. The Interactive Media Group does early stage venture investments. … The Magazines Digital Media Group, where I work, will also be continuing to evaluate acquisitions. We did three last year, Real Age, Kabodole and eCrush. We closed Answerology this year and we are looking at a few more, whether we close a few more I think is a question. Some valuations that we are seeing are still sky high.”
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