Since November 1992, the German news channel ntv has been offering its viewers the latest news on politics, business, sports, and society. ntv now offers its audience the most relevant news via their preferred platform: TV, online, smart phone app or Amazon Echo. Thanks to its cross-platform approach and its focus on business topics during its TV programme, ntv is one of the most important news and business brands in Germany. A major contributor to this successful multi-platform strategy is its website, which has one of the highest digital reaches in Germany.
To increase monetization and the CTR of editorial recommendations on its website, ntv integrated Outbrain‘s Smartfeed technology, a personalized feed experience that drives deeper discovery, longer sessions, and better engagement.
Ticker pages are a popular format for editorial teams and readers as they summarize continuous updates on a specific topic in just one article. However, monetizing these pages has been a challenge for publishers.
With the implementation of a “Read More” button, the user has the ability to expand the topic with just one click, while the publisher can monetize this page with Outbrain’s Smartfeed. Smartfeed also gives the user an opportunity to discover further editorial and sponsored recommendations.
The “Read More” button had a significant impact (an increase of 8-fold) on the viewability of Smartfeed. Accordingly, monetization (+625% increase in RPM) and the click-through rate on editorial recommendations (+426%) were also boosted. Users who wanted to read more of the article responded positively to the button, which is reflected by a 33% click rate.
With the “Read More” button, we could react quickly and flexibly to recent changes in the market. We introduced this new functionality on our site which led to a pleasant user experience and increased the viewability of Smartfeed with little technical effort. The high click rate on the button itself and on other recommendations in the Smartfeed show that our users are open to engaging with these features.”
