IOL Newsflash

News screensaver and live banner ad.

As part of a task team set up by Independent Newspapers' editor, I served as a digital innovation advisor. Looking at their traffic reports and bandwidth usage, we noticed that the front page of the site was taking a lot of strain, while often really interesting stories were never being accessed because they lay deeper in the site and didn't fit the front-page profile.

One of the concepts we came up with to drive traffic to the newspaper's site was Newsflash. At the time this was a radical innovation, serving live news to the desktop, pre-RSS days, as a screensaver and desktop application. Because of the simple and slick interface,it significantly increased traffic to the site and deeper stories were getting many more hits than before. Clients loved it. And so did I - for years it served as my primary news consumption channel.

Other concepts included Live News banners placed on other sites which, as with the screensaver, linked directly to the stories.