Smith: Bloomberg.com passed WSJ.com in February

Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith sent out the following email to the staff on Tuesday with the introduction of the redesigned Bloomberg.com:

Dear Colleagues,

One of Bloomberg Media’s goals last year was to expand our audience beyond core finance professionals to reach the broader global business community. We introduced new products and brands and launched a marketing campaign – “Business is Bloomberg” – to realize this objective.

The heart of our product strategy has been the building of a portfolio of global multi-platform brands that speak directly to different segments of the global business audience.  Within a short year, we’ve established and grown several of these brands – Bloomberg Markets, Bloomberg Politics, Bloomberg Pursuits, and Bloomberg Opinion (home to Gadfly and View content) – with more to come later this year. Each of these sub-brands lives across our media platforms – from the web, television, digital video, print, radio and live events.

This approach is paying off. In February 2016, according to the comScore U.S. multi-platform report, we recorded our best digital traffic month ever on Bloomberg.com, surpassing 27 million unique visitors for the first time and overtaking WSJ.com. We continue to hold a global leadership position in business video, more than doubling our video unique viewers to 21 million in just 15 months per the latest January numbers. Sub-brands such as Bloomberg Politics are playing an important role in the 2016 election cycle on multiple platforms while Bloomberg Markets is redefining daily television markets coverage starring the Bloomberg Terminal as a key source for content and insight.

This new approach has also resonated with the advertising community. In the first quarter of 2016, our digital advertising revenue grew by more than 18% compared to the same time period in 2015. We’ve successfully attracted new advertisers to our flagship digital property, including Apple, HP, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs and Toray.

As part of our ongoing evolution, I’m excited to let you know that we are simplifying our approach to branding and introducing a new digital homepage.

With the establishment of our identity as leader in global business media, we no longer believe that the brand – Bloomberg Business – is required to explain who we are. Our new approach returns us to “Bloomberg” as our over-arching umbrella brand that will house our five growing sub-brands. As our ad campaign stated, Businessis Bloomberg, and we are fully embracing this position going forward.

In order to drive deeper engagement, you’ll find many new enhancements to Bloomberg.com. We’ve cleaned up the design and you’ll see many more images that will drive better usage. We now have new homepage hero modules to better showcase top stories. We have a new scrolling news ticker. We’ve made editorial modifications to create a highly customizable experience, and editors are now able to populate modules within modules.

We’ve rebuilt and simplified our navigation, while providing clarity and giving more prominence to our sub-brands. A new “Menu” button lives on the top left of the homepage, which will bring users to a much stronger home for our sub-brands. As part of this, we’re also highlighting Businessweek much more prominently, and it will have treatment akin to the sub-brands.

One of the areas I’m most excited about is video and you’ll note a few updates across the site with this launch, with more to come over the course of the year.  As we continue to build on our leadership position in global business video, it’s important for us to present this content in a dynamic, user-friendly way. To that end, the design of the new home page video player allows our editors to feature content more robustly and a rebuilt mini-player for our livestream allows users to “pop it” out of the homepage.

In order to deepen our relationship with our users, we’re testing a new data-centric and user acquisition strategy. We are now offering a sign-in option at the top of the homepage that will eventually allow us to sync experiences between devices.

We’ve also created improved opportunities for advertisers, layering in more sponsored content modules that are as beautiful as our design.

Under the leadership of Scott Havens, Jed Sandberg, Paul Caine and Keith Grossman, our new Bloomberg homepage is the product of many months of work from many different teams across our organization. A big thanks to all of you and the teams you worked with to get this done.

What do you think? As always, I welcome your comments, thoughts and ideas.