Increased Video, Click Rates Are Good News for e.Republic

News media and research company e.Republic informs readers about the latest developments in state and local government and education. It runs seven Web sites and publishes five periodicals, in addition to hosting several conferences. To keep up with the constant stream of news, the company initially relied on a content management and publishing system cobbled together from various software, workflows, and processes.

This approach was cumbersome, and the company needed a makeover, according to e.Republic IT director Trever Lee. "We were using systems that all acted differently, and the learning curve was getting in the way of productivity," Lee says. E.Republic's Web team chose Limelight Networks, a provider of digital presence management solutions, for the "flexibility and interoperability" of its cloud-based services, Lee says.

E.Republic selected three Limelight Networks services—Limelight Dynamic Site Platform, Limelight Video Platform, and Limelight Deliver—to streamline its online publishing processes. Since implementing the solutions in 2009, the company has continued to use Limelight to revamp its sites.

One area e.Republic actively enhanced this year is its videos. Online videos have proven effective for audience engagement, and since migrating to the Limelight Video Platform, the company has been able to add more video content to its Web sites. E.Republic's videos include footage of its conferences, news features, editorials, interviews, and promotional materials.

Using Limelight's Video Platform, e.Republic creates custom metadata tags for its videos, and can track user interactions using Limelight analytics tools. On the publisher's site, Govtech.com, for example, visitors have commented on the fact that it is now easier to browse through videos by specific categories, such as budget and finance and e-government. In terms of analytics, e.Republic is looking at user data to understand which content is most relevant, and to provide audience metrics for advertisers.

While the videos had been siloed on e.Republic sites, editors can now share them on YouTube when they're published on an e.Republic domain.

"It is important that we make it easy for people to not only access our videos, but share them as well," Lee says.

E.Republic now has more than 400 videos online and is able to embed its videos directly into its articles. Tying videos to articles has allowed the company to draw more attention to both types of media, Lee says. Although the company declined to share information about monthly page views prior to working with Limelight Networks, it notes that Govtech.com—one of the company's most popular sites—now receives an average of 250,000 to 300,000 monthly page views.

When it added a "You may also like these articles" functionality, e.Republic generally increased page views for its sites by 60,000 per month. It plans to provide video recommendations as well.

"It's all about click rates," Lee comments. "We had this great video page before, but people rarely clicked over to look at it. Now that we've brought video into the text of our articles and improved playback performance, everything has changed."

The Payoff

After teaming up with Limelight Networks, e.Republic has:

• generally increased page views by 60,000 monthly clicks;
• added more than 400 videos to its sites; and
• seen one of its Web sites receive an average of 250,000 to 300,000 monthly page views.

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