One thing we take very seriously at Pinyadda is the success of online publishers, especially our favorite ones. In order to help publishers capture as much value from their digital properties as possible, we have decided to start a series of posts in which we find one simple improvement that could be made to a publisher’s website to help them capture more value either by building community, expanding their audience or making more cold, hard, sweet sweet cash.
With our headquarters located right in the heart of Downtown Boston, most of the Yadda Squad members are pretty big fans of Boston.com, the online destination of The Boston Globe. It is the go to destination for all things Boston – Sox, Celts, local news and events – you name it, they’re usually on it. So for our first post in the series, we’ve decided to go with Boston.com.
Many of you have heard all the buzz around Chris Nolan’s recent movie Inception. It is a wildly exciting, action packed thriller about Leonardo DiCaprio manipulating people’s dreams and blurring the lines between reality and the world of the mind’s subconscious. On July 15th the day before Inception’s opening, Wesley Morris, one of the Globe’s movie critics, wrote a solid review of Nolan’s flick. The timing of the piece was a perfect way to facilitate Boston.com reader’s to go see the movie on opening weekend, so my first thought was, why doesn’t the Globe integrate with Fandango or some service to directly sell movie tickets on their site?
So after a little investigation, I found some software in the section “Things To Do” called Zvents, which lists different types of events by location, such as movies by theater, concerts, etc. Clearly outsourcing some of the work that goes into this type of information gathering and architecture is useful, however here are a few things I think could be improved to help Boston.com see more revenue from their great movie content:
1. Call to action, buy tickets to Inception! WAY more obvious – Back when Avatar came out, not surprisingly we found from collecting data from our index that media coverage of movies correlates with box office earnings. With that being said, I think the main monetization strategy for this piece of content is to capture the intent of the reader which is to learn about Inception, and drive them to purchase their Inception tickets through Boston.com or at least prove they drove the reader to a chosen ticket vendor.
However, the link to the Zvents listing to find showtimes and theaters is a small link in the left hand, in-text module. See the screen shot below. This call to action needs to be loud and obnoxious.
2. If they stick with using Zvents, change the design, or just directly embed a Fandango form if possible – Assuming the Zvents call to action to purchase tickets is moved to the actual page of Mr. Morris’s review, the design provided will need some optimization. The first image below show’s the top of Zvents Inception page which provides a brief summary of the movie, which the reader will not need because they are already getting this information from the trusted Mr. Morris. The second image provides the right information for the next step in a reader’s decision process for purchasing tickets, where to see the movie in the area and the times it is playing, but there is a serious lack of call to action buttons screaming at the user to purchase tickets. If possible, I would directly embed a Fandango form to make the purchasing process as frictionless as possible.
Locations & times image below:
3. Give the reader more social proof that others have seen the movie – I would test calls to action to engage more users to review the movie. While they have commenting software and two user reviews in the Zvents application for the movie, these are buried and not easy to find. The more social proof that can be provided, the more likely the reader will be to jump at buying tickets then and there.
4. Put the purchase calls to action in multiple places throughout the article and see which one works best – Morris’s article is two pages long, so it will be important to have the call to action at different breaks in the review. My guess is most people don’t make it to the second page, but the calls to action could be in a number of places:
- the main fixture of the right side bar.
- an in-text module at the beginning, middle or end of the first page.
- embedded above or in the user reviews/comments.
I am uncertain how realistic any of these changes are regarding how much burden they would put on the copy editors or the technical team at Boston.com but some of these tweaks could potentially lead to higher revenues. What do you think? Are there better ways to drive Boston.com readers to purchase their tickets from Morris’s review? Leave thoughts/ideas in the comments below!