Millions of users captivated
Generating around million page views every week, the Urban List is a uber popular trend-spotting and lifestyle portal. Its success is driven by highly engaging content, served up in a way that captivates readers and sends them down a rabbit hole of highly consumable content.
Partnering with big brands, the Urban List’s revenue is based on sponsored content and ads –and consistently high volume of engaged users equates to a great return on investment for advertisers.
Enter Newism
The site was inherited by the original designer/developer who, let’s say “hit the ceiling” when it came to their technical capabilities. It was early days for Urban List, but their rapid trajectory charted like a sharp, upward rocket take-off rather than a gradual incline; and the momentum was only growing. Unfortunately, there was no contingency plan or scope for sudden traffic spikes and the site experienced interruptions, typically during peak and critical times. After onboarding new advertisers, this was a clear and present risk for Urban List’s reputation and viability.
As an immediate, band-aid solution Newism leapt into action applying various, immediate tactics to better cope with traffic surges during peak periods to mitigate downtime.
With issue and performance tracking in place, we had opened a can of worms, realising there were deep-rooted issues with the coding methodology and structure. A significant concern was the tangled spider web of third-party scripts causing performance issues and conflicts.
While it didn’t happen overnight, we followed a planned process to address issues using the MoSCow prioritisation method until the website was stable and lightning fast.
Continued success & growth
The Urban List is continually evolving and implementing innovating strategies to ensure the audience is captivated and engaged – which feeds back into the revenue model of delivering value to advertisers.
We continue to provide daily support to the Urban List’s digital teams; and monitor performance, user behaviour and issue alerts to identify opportunities for further improvement.