by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) TV and online seem to be such a happy fit so it has always perplexed me that eNews Channel Africa – or eNCA (previously eNews) – went for so long without a proper website. In fact, eNCA only launched its site – under GM Tim Spira – in April this year.
But even with eNCA still in the process of establishing its brand (the change was necessitated by the launch of a UK channel on the Sky pay-TV platform in August last year), the site’s numbers are exceeding its own expectations: at more than 270 000 domestic users in May, which was its first full month of in existence.
Grubstreet spoke to Spira last week to find out more about why it took so long for eNCA to establish an online presence and what mistakes they hope to avoid by coming to the party so late.
Grubstreet: So it’s weird that it took eNCA so long to get online but I guess the great thing for you is that you’re starting from a position of knowledge. You can set up and run online with the benefit of lots of past digital learning.
Tim Spira: Yes, absolutely. Coming in this late in the game is a double-edged sword.
There are a lot of entrenched players out there that are doing very well so you need to effectively take market share away from them. But, at the same time, one can approach it with a very contemporary mind set and with a better view of current realities of online media than some of the competitor sites – because they were developed a while ago and have had to adapt to the innovations like the prevalence of social media and the increasing appeal of multimedia content…
I think we’re trying to take the lessons where we can and I’d like to think that in certain areas we’ve been able to leapfrog.
Grubstreet: Which areas are those?
Spira: Well, the one thing we’ve been very conscious of is social-media integration so we draw quite a bit of content from social media. We try to integrate our content as much as we can into social platforms.
Having said that, I wouldn’t necessarily say that we’re the best in the market. We’re also just feeling our way. But certainly I would say we have a greater understanding of the importance of it than maybe some of the other players do.
That’s one aspect. The other one – and it goes back to your original point, which is: ‘Why has it taken us so long to launch any kind of online presence?’ – and I think it really goes to the fact that as a broadcaster we see our strength as being in video content. Up until this point – and, quite frankly, if we’ve even reached this point is questionable – there have been constraints in terms of broadband penetration in South Africa.
And while this is changing, the fact is that the market would have been so niche that it wouldn’t have made commercial sense for us to launch a video-rich online presence (before now).
Grubstreet: Ja, one still encounters buffering while viewing video. You can’t really believe this can still be happening in 2013.
Spira: One encounters buffering a lot. And not only is the access slow but it’s expensive in comparison with more developed markets.
Also, it’s not only the end-user bandwidth but the bandwidth from ISPs (internet service providers) is very expensive. So that’s another thing that we’ve done a little different to how we might have approached things a couple of years ago: we’re actually hosting on an international CDN both for video and for the rest of the site.
We’re using Amazon Web Services for our website and a business called Kaltura to deliver video because we couldn’t really find a suitable scalable solution in the current South African ISP market – and it was also very expensive (in SA).
Our CMS (content-management system) is an area we thought long and hard about and we ultimately decided to go with an open-source CMS. That would have been unheard of a few years ago (for a large operation) .
Grubstreet: Absolutely. What are using?
Spira: Drupal. There have been great advances in open-source web technologies and so far we’ve been very happy.
Grubstreet: So you must be customising Drupal to your heart’s content then?
Spira: Yes. We’ve built a lot of custom modules, which we give back and share with the Drupal community, which is how it works in the spirit of open source. What it means as well is that we get the benefit of a broad distributed group of developers that are making improvement to the system all the time.
Grubstreet: And is eNCA online integrated with the newsroom?
Spira: Well, we’ve grown very quickly – not that we didn’t plan to grow very quickly – but sometimes the space planning and the business planning don’t converge.
But I’m really happy now that we’ve put our editorial team right in the heart of the TV editorial team so there’s very close integration between channel and online, which is wonderful.
I’ve come out of environments where that hasn’t been the case. And it was something I was very conscious of going into this process: that if we didn’t take full advantage of integration with TV – both from a content and skills perspective and using TV as a marketing platform – we’d be wasting our time.
Grubstreet: It must help a lot that (eNCA group head) Patrick Conroy gets online.
Spira: It makes the job much easier. If there isn’t that kind of buy-in from the top, it’s natural that different business units are going to clash. And while there is some healthy competition between online and TV, we’ve already seen countless examples where the one has really assisted the other.
Television and online are very complementary operations – much more so than with print and online in my experience. The one phenomenon we’ve been seeing a lot of is that the effect of mentioning online on TV has an immediate impact on (web) traffic.
Also, because the time constraints on TV are so tight, there is often an opportunity from a TV perspective to add value for the audience. So if you’re running a 15-second clip from an interview on TV, we can run the entire interview online. It’s a fabulous opportunity to mention: ‘If you want to see the full interview, go to eNCA.com’ – and we see the impact of that.
But we have to be careful not to overdo it. We have to be sure that when we refer people to web, that there’s real value to what they’ll find there.
But it’s a win for both platforms – and similarly we can promote upcoming programming on the website and provide what is at the moment a very basic catch-up service, which we’re hoping to develop into something more comprehensive.
Grubstreet: This isn’t just a website you’ve launched. This is also about taking the eNCA brand forward, isn’t it?
Tim Spira: You know, we’re in an interesting phase in our development in terms of eNCA more broadly. We’re going through a review of our brand and our sub-brands at the moment.
Because the business has grown extremely quickly, there have been a lot of changes that we’ve had to embrace on a tactical rather than a strategic level.
Last year, for example, we launched in the UK and that was what necessitated the change in name to eNCA. We couldn’t be eNews internationally because there’s E! Entertainment and E! News among others.
Even though the eNews channel was around for about five years, eNCA is still a very new and relatively unknown brand. As much as we (at online) are piggybacking on the brand equity that TV has built, we’re also doing an important job in terms of broadening the awareness of the eNCA brand.
Grubstreet: So who are eNCA’s main competitors? News24?
Spira: Look, in terms of online news in South Africa, News24 is way ahead of everybody else.
Grubstreet: They haven’t left many gaps in the markets.
Spira: Yes, they really do dominate and they have a presence in all of the niche content areas, which does make it a very strong competitor and I think they will remain very strong.
But I think what we’re trying to do is very different from what they’re doing. News24 has an important place and they’re really fast with the news and really comprehensive. They have a very broad offering.
Where we, perhaps, differ is that I think we place greater store in generating original content and breaking stories. I think we’re probably a lot less reliant on the wires than they are and also we have a wealth of our own video content.
I know News24 is doing a very good job at aggregating video content but, ultimately, we’re slightly higher up on the supply chain on that one.
Grubstreet: What are your stats like at the moment, Tim?
Spira: Well, they’re not bad actually. We’ve got our (Effective Measure) numbers for May, which was the first full month of being tracked by Effective Measure because we launched on the 10th of April.
In May we had 273 000 unique browsers – and that’s domestic. Worldwide, we had the 443 000 unique browsers and about 1.8-million page views. Local page views was 1.4-million.
Grubstreet: That’s excellent for a two-month-old site and a new brand.
Spira: I’m really happy. It’s way ahead of what we had in our business plan.
There are some areas we need to work on. We need to increase the frequency of usage. We need to make sure people come back and spend more time on the site but we’re thrilled about the number of people we’re reaching – and it’s a good basis for growth.
Grubstreet: You said earlier that you went for international hosting so you’d have scalability. I’m presuming you’re planning on lots more multimedia and more video?
Spira: Yes, absolutely. It’s our key point of differentiation. We’ll definitely be very focused on that and more so as the market matures.
Grubstreet: And that will certainly increase time on site.
Spira: Definitely. We use a live-streaming service, for example, called Livestation which we don’t make available in South Africa (so that it doesn’t compete with the 24-hour eNCA satellite news channel) and one of the things we’ve noticed is that the time on site for a live-streaming service is just way beyond anything you’d expect from an on-demand news offering.
But certainly, we playing around with longer-form on-demand video and we’ll also be trying out new ways of delivering video in the future.
– SA’s leading media commentator, Gill Moodie, offers intelligence on media – old and new. Reprinted from her site Grubstreet.