By NYU Staff

Every good website has a well-defined target audience in mind. Some offer niche information that attracts a loyal group of followers. Some choose to offer everything in every medium regarding one subject, which, naturally many people will come visit because it saves them time. Both can be successful models. It all depends how the website balances what it wants to do and what technology allows it to do. For this semester, I will focus on the mega-sites that serve as a giant warehouse of a relatively broad topic.  They are monopolistic in their respective fields and their mission is to keep their crown safe from aggressive invaders.

An example here is CNBC.com. Like lots of other big sites, this site is a powerhouse of business news. It has three main elements—biz news in writing forms, biz video clips, and financial data. As CNBC.com is backed by CNBC cable network, the website is well strengthened by the video content that many of its competitors don’t have the privilege to.  It is also to be noticed that to maximize interaction between TV and web is not such a simple task. Many similar sites like CBS.com and ABC.com almost completely separate their TV content and online stories. What CNBC.com does is to incorporate the recent interview clips in a short write up based on the interview. Separately the CNBC.com homepage sets the left third of its homepage for TV clips updates.  That way the TV content dovetails with the writing part.

In terms of the written news content which is the bulk of the website, one thing that CNBC.com beats many other competitors is it truly accentuates on the immediacy by feeding much on news wires such as AP and Reuters. It also selects a few more newsworthy ones and packages them up with related links, graphics and slideshows in order to keep the readers on the site.  While well packaged ones take extra time, the un-packaged content is already on the site. Thus the readers don’t miss out on the news. Plus the website spends a big amount of time working on slideshows because they find out good sideshows make readers stick around.

The last big chunk of CNBC.com’s content is its focus on providing real time market data. CNBC.com claims it is the only site that provides real time data. Other sites such as yahoo finance or google finance have at least 15 minutes’ lag. People working for the site say that most people come to the site for data, such as stock price. Overall videos get the least traffic because many come to the site to check out a video they just missed rather than randomly browsing available vids.

Other than the focusing on the right thing in its three chunks of content—written news, TV interview clips and market data, one thing that worth pointing out is CNBC.com’s emphasis on branding. Many anchors and TV reporters have their profile sites where they present a portfolio of their work such as blogs, interviews and documentaries they have done. Both CNBC and its website are aware their business is of personality driven nature. Therefore to utilize all platforms to promote the talents is their number one priority.