AJC.com Redesign

As our team approached the redesign we had a very specific goal, to ensure readers that experienced AJC.com for the first time, left with a feeling that our content is worth paying for. With return users, we wanted to build on that initial impression, establish an ongoing relationship between our readers and our journalists, and finally convince our readers to support journalism by becoming subscribers.

AJC.com Before

AJC.com After Header, Footer, Navigation Updates

As we worked towards our desired end-state, we found opportunities to deliver value incrementally. Initially, we released new global navigation, site header, and footer and content organization on the home page to refocus our site on our journalism and journalists.

• Our Main Navigation is now far more extensive to showcase the depth of coverage offered by our Newsroom, the largest in metro Atlanta. It is surfaced using the hamburger menu.

• We introduced dynamic navigation across the top of the site to ensure trending news stories are pinned to the top of the site as users browse the site.

• We stopped peppering the site with sponsored stories and instead gave them dedicated space and clearly labeled them as such.

• We reduced negative space and packed more journalism into the viewport for greater content density.

• We introduced a new display class to highlight columnists.

• We began telling the story of our brand with a local marketing campaign and onsite takeover.

Go To Market

The Results

Results were positive. Along with our site redesign, we introduced a subscription gateway that has generated 17,800 new digital subscribers in the first 6 months. These are net-new on top of the previous base of digital subscribers (24,000) that had taken six years to establish.

We had built our existing base of 24,000 digital subscribers over six years (2014 - 2020).

Results: After launching the AJC.com product updates, we gained 17,800 net new subscribers in 6 months (10/6/20 - 4/6/21). Bringing the total count of digital subscriptions to 41,800 by the end of Q1 2021.

In 2020, we outperformed our competitors establishing our website, brand, and journalism as the clear leader in local news for Atlanta, GA. Even after we introduced out payment gateway, which restricts content access to 4 free articles per user per month - we still held our lead demonstrating we had found a way to slowly ramp down unpredictable digital advertising revenue while replacing it with long-term subscription revenue.