Decluttered site to clean up on ads

Entertainment.iehas undergone its first major redesign since 2008 in a bid to boost levels of display advertising, increase social media engagement and improve the site for mobile users.

The relaunched site has been “decluttered” to make room for more video content and for larger and harder-to-ignore web advertising formats such as “takeovers”, which are favoured by brands.

"It's a totally new website basically," says Entertainment.iemanaging director Julian Douglas, who says the more streamlined interface creates "a big, big canvas for advertisers".

Given the difficulties in competing with broadcasters’ sites for pre-roll video advertising, the 15-year-old company, in which The Irish Times Ltd has a 30 per cent stake, is more confident about growing display revenues.

Newer forms of display advertising, including interactive home page takeovers, are more attention-grabbing than static “polite banner” advertisements, but risk annoying site users.

“Advertisers want to have more impact in display – they want more of a presence. But the challenge for publishers is not to negate the experience for readers,” says Douglas.

Entertainment.ie's advertising is sold by the agency Electric Media, which is 50 per cent owned by The Irish Times Ltd.

The relaunched site is also tablet-friendly and more mobile-convenient, Douglas adds, while social media logins, including a Pin It button for image-led social media site Pinterest, have been incorporated to facilitate comments and shares.

Entertainment.ie, which has 600,000 monthly unique visitors, has added eight new jobs in the past year and now employs 20 staff, about 15 of which are editors and writers producing local content. This distinguishes it from portals that are "a little bit vanilla", according to Douglas.

He believes it is this local content that will help reverse trends whereby online ad networks pull income out of the country by selling advertisements targeted at “Irish eyeballs on foreign websites”.

Douglas expects Entertainment.ie's turnover will reach "a couple of million" this year, up 50 per cent on last year, as it captures growth in the online advertising market and expands its nascent ticketing business. The company, which recently acted as the exclusive ticket-seller for Dublin's Camden Crawl music weekend, aims to grow ticketing from 10 per cent of turnover to 30 per cent.