Four months after redesigning its .com consumer website with a cleaner, more advertiser-friendly look, Reuters (NYSE: TRI) will get around to giving Reuters.co.uk the same lick of paint this coming Friday.
“We’ve been hiding our light under a bushell as a consumer-facing organisation,” Thomson Reuters’ consumer media general manager Tim Faircliff tells me. “The content assets in the combined Thomson-Reuters family give us some great ammunition to take to a consumer market.”
Unlike many of Reuters services, which target business professionals with premium prices, Reuters.co.uk is the wire’s free, open website – that means it needs advertisers, and that’ Faircliff’s play…
“We’re saying to advertisers that we have an incredible audience that you don’t know we have,” he says. “I’ve revamped my commercial operation over the last six or seven months and made some significant hires.
“We started to organise the site around topics. By topics, you can create topics of advertiser interest – whether broad topics like foreign currency exchanges or narrow topics around the small business environment.”
Seventeen international localisations are following the U.S. Reuters.com redesign, and geo-IP targeting will be deployed from the summer to automatically show readers the relevant sections. The core Reuters.com has seen a 20 percent “engagement” uplift since the December redesign, Faircliff says.
The site may be free – but don’t rule out future paid launches. “We’re moving in to the ad-supported model with a nod to the fact that paid is part of the DNA of our organisation.”
“The monetisation model we have should reflect the value of our content. We’re very comfortable with paid-for-content models. The future is in powerful niche verticals with content.
“We reserve the right to charge for areas. If we were to move in to utilising Thomson Reuters assets like tax and accounting or healthcare, we could easily create a site that is world-class and unavailable elsewhere.”