It’s amazing to finally see the new ABC News digital experience properly out in the wild. It's been months of work, across a huge number of teams within not just Digital Product but a significant collaborative effort with our friends in both News and Marketing. It encapsulates a significant step forward for us. One that is a deliberate attempt to appeal to a broader set of the Australian public through a modern, fresh and hopefully more inviting look and feel. It’s important as ABC News constitutes well over half of our weekly digital audiences. It acts as a key gateway into our other products such as ABC iview and ABC listen. So by doing a better job of attracting and retaining audiences through News, we anticipate a rising tide effect elsewhere. Yesterday morning at 6am, we had a raft of teams across Digital Product up early to support the launch. The best launches are the uneventful ones and that was very much the case yesterday. It’s a sign though of solid preparation when a rollout of this magnitude goes according to plan. We wanted to coincide the Web launch with the TV brand refresh that hit audiences via ABC News Breakfast. I must say felt the rebrand was looking sensational across TV yesterday. From black to blue – it's really a much more engaging News brand overall now and seeing it coordinated across TV, digital and third party speaks to the incredible collaboration behind the scenes. One unexpected positive from the launch was witnessing an overall server demand drop, as our morning audience traffic increased from 6am. This is a very rare set of events to occur simultaneously! It was due to the new homepage being built a lot more efficiently than its predecessor. Thus requiring less resources and ultimately delivering faster page load times for our audiences. Although you might have seen some minor changes with the ABC News App, there’s a lot more to come here. We made a collective call to stagger the releases here so that we could de-risk the rollout. So watch this space in the coming weeks. Super proud of what the team's have achieved here 😁 https://lnkd.in/gx9zZXDw
Looking great 🙌🏻
Congrats Joel and all the contributing digital teams - massive effort!
Great work J!
Building Better Businesses
3moAm enjoying the improved app experience Joel. Congrats on what you and the team have achieved here, and I look forward to the future releases. Great strategy and top execution. V impressed