Can CNN, the Go-to Site, Get You to Stay?
CNN.com is vying to hold its visitors’ attention. Jack Andelman manages the site’s media mix.
K. C. ESTENSON, the new general manager of CNN.com, has a thought or two about most news sites on the Web: they’re predictable and homogeneous. Seen one, seen ’em all.
The Web site isn’t an afterthought: CNN.com has its own newsroom and about 125 workers.
Even his own site, he says, could use more of a “unique signature.”
While traffic to the home page of CNN.com is higher than ever, “my hunch is that people go to it more out of habit than they do out of love,” he says. Love, in fact, is exactly what Mr. Estenson is pursuing.
Online ardor will get a test on Tuesday, with the inauguration of Barack Obama. Because millions of Americans will be at their desks for the noon-hour swearing-in, the event is expected to set new records for live Web video watching — a moment that CNN.com is well positioned to exploit.
As newspaper revenue collapses and television revenue stagnates, every media company is rushing to reformat news for the digital generation. To that end, they are placing expensive bets in the hope of answering two pointed questions: How will news organizations continue to sustain themselves? And what will the digital newsroom of the future look like?
To a greater degree than most other media companies, CNN, the cable news channel of record, has figured it out. Using page views as a metric, Nielsen ranked CNN.com as the No. 1 current events and global news Web site last year, with a monthly average of 1.7 billion — half a billion views more than its nearest competitor, MSNBC.com.
Analysts say the Web site represents the fastest-growing part of CNN’s revenue, reflecting the sharp increase in online consumption.
For decades, “What channel is CNN?” was a recurrent query when a jury reached a verdict, when the towers burned, and when war broke out. Now, people also ask: “Where do I log on?” In fact, the emergency landing of an airliner last week in the Hudson River generated one of the biggest traffic spikes ever for news Web sites.
This transition, of course, has been happening for years, and it continues today, a headline at a time. Last year, for the first time, more Americans said they received most of their national and international news from the Internet than from print, according to the Pew Research Center.
Television remains the leading outlet for news, but the trend favoring the Internet is undeniable. Richard D. Parsons, the former chief executive of CNN’s parent Time Warner, alluded to it in 2007 when he told investors, “I worry more about CNN now than I do about CNN.com.”
Television continues to account for a vast majority of CNN’s revenue. But the Web is becoming more than just another ancillary revenue stream for CNN, according to Greg D’Alba, the company’s head of ad sales.
Until early 2008, most online ads were sold in conjunction with television advertising packages, adding incremental revenue.
“What we saw early last year was an appetite for digital-only,” says Mr. D’Alba, acknowledging that the shift surprised him. “We knew then that our digital product could stand on its own.”
WHEN people boot up their computers in the morning or browse Web sites while at work, they tend to check one of a handful of sites for news headlines. While news choices on the Internet are seemingly endless, the “Web news wars” are concentrated among a few top competitors.
Mr. Estenson says that in addition to CNN.com, he focuses on four other sites: those of MSNBC, Yahoo News, AOL News and The New York Times. Of those, MSNBC is his primary challenger.
For a decade now, MSNBC and CNN have traded places at the top of the online news heap. To win bragging rights and a bigger share of online advertising revenue, the two sites are constantly seeking the No. 1 spot. On a monthly basis during 2008, MSNBC.com’s network of sites received more visitors than CNN.com’s network, according to Nielsen — though CNN.com’s visitors still viewed substantially more pages.
“Neither is the No. 1 cable news network, which is ironic,” notes Merrill Brown, a former editor in chief of MSNBC.com who now consults for Internet companies. (That honor belongs to Fox News.)
Indeed, popularity on TV and in print has not necessarily translated to the Web. Fox News draws more viewers than CNN and MSNBC, but it lags far behind both online. Other TV news organizations, including ABC News and CBS News, are essentially also-rans on the Web.
CNN got a head start. The site, which made its debut in 1995, “wasn’t a promotional site for TV; it was actually a news platform for a news-consuming audience,” says Susan Grant, the executive vice president of CNN News Services, an umbrella for the company’s Internet businesses. And Time Warner has lavished attention and money on the site. Years ago, while other media companies treated the Web as a distraction, CNN’s executives set the network on an interactive course. Tom Johnson, a former chairman of the CNN News Group, said in 2000 that the Web would be “one of the most — if not the most — important parts” of the brand’s future. “We will be a ubiquitous service,” he said.
Traffic grew gradually for CNN.com. On Election Day in 2000, CNN.com recorded 100 million page views, a monumental number at the time. On the same day last year, the site had 282 million page views, also setting a record.
CNN now is as close as any news entity is to achieving ubiquity, with an array of television channels, Web sites, a radio network, airport TV sets and magazines. It is even signing up newspapers for a wire service — fed by CNN.com — that will compete with The Associated Press.
The challenge, for Mr. Estenson and others, is to make CNN.com more distinctive. At the end of a long day recently, he showed a visitor screen grabs of four Web pages on his Macbook Air.
“When you look at the top news sites, they often look almost identical,” he says, gesturing to the home pages of CNN, ABC News, The Wall Street Journal and Yahoo News. Down to photo choices and color schemes, the four sites look practically interchangeable and utilitarian, he says — hence his emphasis on the power of “unique signatures.”
An unusual choice for his new job, Mr. Estenson was tapped to run CNN.com in July after spending seven years at the Walt Disney Company, where he oversaw entertainment sites.
Propelled by what he calls the “constant positive dissatisfaction” of his bosses, Mr. Estenson is acting as CNN.com’s in-house optometrist, constantly trying to improve the site’s vision.
To that end, he wants to ensure that CNN.com’s success doesn’t cripple innovation. “Fear of change can send you to a very conservative place,” he says, rolling up his shirt sleeves. “We want to redefine the news experience.”
Already, CNN.com is a well-oiled news machine. With headquarters in Atlanta, the site has about 125 staff members. Producers on the news desk post “breaking news” banners and select stories to highlight on an ever-changing home page.
The site is well known for sometimes offbeat headlines. A recent sampling included “Teen sends 14,528 texts in one month” and “Co-ed’s virginity selling for over $3.7M.” A T-shirt icon next to some stories lets users order a shirt with the headline on it.
On the more traditional side, CNN.com holds morning meetings to discuss the day’s priorities and to divvy up assignments. The work is coordinated with CNN’s television channels and other platforms, allowing the company’s journalists to “produce in parallel,” says Rena Golden, the executive producer of CNN.com.
Creating such collaboration wasn’t easy. For years, the site was largely independent of the television network. CNN.com would receive video from TV crews, for instance, but only after the made-for-TV segment had been pieced together.
All of that has changed. Now, production is concurrent for each platform and stories often appear first online. Alex Wellen, an editor on the politics site of CNN.com, said that integration was a struggle.
“It’s a very complicated thing to integrate newsrooms, to change people’s job descriptions, and to establish trust across multiple platforms,” he says. “The challenge is herculean.”
While CNN’s various platforms haven’t completely converged, they are far more integrated than they once were.
Tracking audience sweet spots is also a juggling act. CNN’s television arm exerts much of its pull during the prime-time hours of 8 to 11 p.m., when advertising rates and audience levels are highest. But for the Web news desk in Atlanta, prime time is the lunch hour, when users log on during work breaks.
More broadly, Ms. Golden defines “Web prime” as 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. During those hours, the home page will feature six or seven lead stories, on average, so no one headline lingers too long.
Feeding the home page are a growing number of reporters who are assigned to the Web, and pointedly not to television or radio. CNN.com counts two Pulitzer Prize winners on its staff.
In October, CNN.com posted a memorable story about Ann Nixon Cooper, a 106-year-old in Atlanta who intended to vote for Mr. Obama. He ended up referring to her in his victory speech on election night. Mr. Estenson said that to his chagrin, that story was highlighted on the home page for only two hours.
Mr. Estenson says he wants CNN’s most distinctive content on the home page because he believes those stories keep readers on the site longer. Every week, he studies a pie chart that shows the “bounce rate” for CNN.com. It measures how many users view one Web page and then leave the site, akin to a shopper who browses without buying.
Right now, more than half of CNN.com’s visitors are just browsing. Last year, MSNBC drew more users but CNN kept them on the site longer. If Mr. Estenson can lower the bounce rate, he can further increase page views, potentially reaping millions more in ad dollars.
WHICH brings us to a pivotal issue: money. While audiences for online news sites are growing, “revenue is everyone’s billion-dollar question,” Mr. Brown says.
CNN.com formally achieved profitability eight years ago, the company said; Time Warner doesn’t break out separate revenue figures for the unit. In an era when “monetization” is a buzz word among news organizations migrating to the Web, CNN.com has been able to capitalize on its traffic surge by keeping visitors on the site longer, thus exposing them to more ads.
It’s also trying to make money from more experimental forays. During the inauguration coverage on Tuesday, for the first time, CNN.com Live, the Web site’s video arm, will include TV-style commercial breaks. Until now. the only ads on the streaming service have been snippets that play before the main clip, and small sponsorship banners.
Amid a recession, advertising sales are sluggish on television and online, putting a damper on CNN’s growth plans. But CNN.com is expected to remain flush; while Web revenue doesn’t match TV’s, the costs aren’t nearly as high.
Mr. Estenson and other executives expect that the digital operation will one day surpass television in revenue, echoing predictions of other executives confronting the Internet revolution.
And his estimate of when that day might come is sobering, despite CNN.com’s financial buoyancy: 10 to 20 years from now.
EXTENDING CNN.com’s reach, in part through partnerships with other Web brands, is a priority for Mr. Estenson. In Washington last week, he huddled with staff members at YouTube, the Google platform that is the world’s biggest video-sharing Web site, to discuss a collaboration.
The week before, CNN announced a deal with another Web darling, Facebook, to allow users to update their Facebook status messages while watching CNN’s video stream of the inauguration. CNN.com’s coverage of the event is now marked on the online calendars of hundreds of thousands of Facebook users.
Still, success has its burdens, as the inauguration will test. While television easily digests a sudden swelling in its audience, the Internet isn’t as stable.
Mr. Estenson notes that one of the Web’s biggest live streams occurred last March, when an Oprah.com event was streamed by more than 500,000 users. It was plagued by technical problems.
For Inauguration Day, CNN has reserved racks of extra server space. Not knowing how many people will watch the swearing-in online, Mr. Estenson says, “is nerve-racking.”
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