Video: Duncan Edwards on Hearst’s digital strategy

To watch the full four minute interview, simply click on the video above. For the condensed version, see the soundbytes below.

We’ve been building our digital businesses around the franchises (0:38)

“We’re pretty much everywhere where we’ve been in print. We’ve been building our digital businesses around the franchises that we’ve built over many many years in print, such as Cosmopolitan, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, together with some very large scale pure-play digital businesses such as the UK entertainment website, Digital Spy.”

We’ve developed our own technology that has enabled us to rapidly speed up the process of launching and relaunching sites around the world (1:01) 

“We’ve developed a technology platform – content management system – that we own and operate, through technology teams in the UK and US working together, and this has enabled us to rapidly speed up the process of launching and relaunching sites around the world.”

We’ve built the capacity of a 24hr a day [international] newsroom for most of our brands (1:24)

“The other big thing that we’ve been doing this year is sharing content, so we’ve built the capacity of a 24hr newsroom for most of our major brands. By connecting the journalists who work on Cosmo websites, for example, in the US, the UK, Australia, and other places in the world, we cover the world 24hrs a day. And then we make all of that content available to all other editions of Cosmo websites and they can then use that content, modify that content, translate that content, and therefore dramatically increase what they could otherwise do with the team size that they would have.”

I don’t think we ever saw social media as competition – it’s been a partnership (2:57)

“I don’t think we ever saw social media as competition – it’s been a partnership between us as the content creators and the various social platforms as a means of spreading the content that we create. I mean clearly what we’re interested in doing is having balance – we want people to come to our websites directly through App-based access, urls, search, but we also want people to be sharing the content that they see on our sites with their friends and family and building our audience that way.”

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