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Interview: Alex Ballantyne, MD of Hearst Digital 'Why rush? We're building properties for the medium to long term, not short-term gain'

Spending too long peering down on Oxford Circus at the rush of shoppers gadding about below seemingly responding to the beat of some distant messianic drum can start to make you feel giddy.

Aside from being a little sick-making, it's also reminder of a particular new media mindset that's forever focused on climbing all over and claiming ownership of whichever new technology, trend or zeitgeist that should happen round the corner next.

That may be the attitude of certain new media cliques but it’s not one that's held high over Oxford Circus.

Sitting in the office of Hearst Digital, managing director Alex Ballantyne is giving me the Hearst/Nagmags take on entering the frenetic world of digital publishing.

"Why rush?" he says.

"We're building these properties for the medium to long term not just for short-term gain. That's one of the nice aspects of sitting in this chair; we're not knee-jerk into trends and fads.

"We want to have a well thought through commercial strategy and rational as to why we'd want to make large investments in new technologies.

"I look out at the horizon and I see almost everyone running fast just to keep up with the Joneses, apposed to [asking] 'is there a here and now opportunity?' We're not pressured in that way, we don't need to be, so we wont be.

"That's not to say that we're slow or indecisive, we just don't see the case to do that just yet."

It's a policy that seems to be working for them.

Hearst Digital is the online division of Natmags publishing its five newer, more immediately web friendly, titles and managing the infrastructure of its other magazine companion sites.

Ballantyne says that the growth of audience across Hearst Digital's titles - Getlippy, NetDoctor, Handbag, Cosmo and newest Allaboutyou - shows they are in good health, even though Natmags was one of the last magazine publishers to turn its attention to online publishing.

"It's fair to say that Natmags has been a late starter in the game. Its first site YouandYourwedding launched in April 2006, which is quite late.

"It decided that back during all the hype of the early dotcom boom that it would watch and see what happens. Around 2005 it decided that things had changed, broadband had caught fire in the UK, some of the infrastructure costs had come down and the third thing was that the advertising market became real. But in 2000 there wasn't a true market developing at that time.

"As a publisher of magazines it made sense not to jump at that time. Since it has made the leap not only has it gone hell for leather with the development programme but also we've made a number of strategic acquisitions, including Handbag.

"If you think where we have come from in 2006 with first site launch to now having four million women across our properties that’s quite some going, I think."

The last year has seen Heart Digital enter a process of overhauling its titles, introducing social media and video services as they go.

Cosmo relaunched in April with targets of five million page impressions and half a million monthly unique users by the end of the year.

"We're pretty much on track to achieve those numbers this month or next month when at the start of the year we said we'd try and achieve that by December. We're well ahead of the curve with Cosmo, it has been a fantastic response from the market."

He attributes success to a new SOE-friendly platform that was built specifically for the launch, the improved knowledge of the importance of tagging for search amongst editors and substantial cross promotion through magazine and across its network of sites.

However, more than a few eyebrows were raised when Hearst released plans for the launch of behemoth site Allaboutyou to act as a portal for six Natmags titles - Good Housekeeping, Prima, Country Living, House Beautiful, Coast and She magazine - that were not then well served online.

Natmags has so many titles, Ballantyne says, it was going to be hard to get the best out of them all as individual entities online so the decision was taken to combine those six magazines (with four digital companion sites) into a portal.

"Individually the sites in their own right were doing OK, but where were they going to? It was very complex, we have basically brought four different websites, four different user bases and for different interest groups together into one larger site, which has just made the entire offering so much better."

But could such a large site cover all that ground successfully and draw the audience necessary to make it a success?

The jury may be out for a while yet - but early signs are promising. Allaboutyou.com was launched little over two months ago but Hearst Digital forecast just fewer than 400,000 users for the site for June compared to last June's combined forecast of 135,000 across the title specific websites.

"If you look at the response from launch we have doubled the number of users already from this time last year from a collective of small independent sites."

Aside from the raw traffic the launch also allowed Hearst to roll out and experiment with the suite of tools it had purchased from Pluck.

Allaboutyou was the first site in Europe to use a full implementation of Pluck's suite of social media technologies across its forums, photo upload sites and readers and editors blogs.

"What Pluck allows us to do it surface the most read and the most popular articles and the most commented on articles, across the site and on each channel. It has two effects. It encourages readers to use other stuff and provides feedback to editors."

Plans are afoot to implement Pluck across other sites, Ballantyne says. Handbag will get a 'social' Pluck makeover by the end of August with other sites adding elements of the technology.

"We're going to implement [Pluck on the other sites] in a way that is consistent with those propositions. The implementation will be quite different. It will have the same functionality there but the purpose for which we use it will be different in orientation for a different audience."

Short-term focus, he adds, will be all about further investment these properties.

That also means an imminent launch of NetDoctor TV to complement the video services across the other titles.

Ballantyne sees video as one of the key elements of the business in the longer-term. Hearst already has several partnerships in this area - with Blinx for viral distribution of the 30 videos it makes across its UK titles in a month, Mymovies supplies it with generic content, and with technology partner Brightcove, in which Hearst has invested.

Focus, however, will also be on staff training to develop in-house video production so each title's TV service begins to look more and more unique, he says.

"The big difference is that we've increase time on site by about 25 per cent on Handbag since we launched video, so clearly it's making a large change in terms of engagement with users.

"All the talk in the industry is that engagement is becoming a more of a core metric and I think that's what video will add for us, user traction, loyalty and engagement. We don't make money yet on engagement but I think it's the key thing to be doing."

And the longer term aims with video? Always looking for new moves, but nothing radically different, he says.

"We need to think about mobile and we need to think about television and video. The challenge is still there for us to really leverage those opportunities.

"Long term I think we will perform a much more diversified platform delivery for all our properties."

For that read: Interested in Kangaroo and similar platforms and the possibilities of supplying longer form programming but serious consideration of such is not on the agenda just yet.

Mobile will have to wait too, he says, as focuses is on growing the online business first. Unlike in the States where Hearst already has nine mobile sites.

"It's just really the timing of that, the critical question, as always, is when does it make investment sense to make a bigger leap into those areas, but certainly going to give that serious thought throughout the autumn and into next year."

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