Dennis Publishing says: Dennis Interactive, the division of Dennis Publishing which designs, creates and manages all of Dennis Publishing’s websites, has just seen its first ever £1million month from digital display revenue. The division has seen particular success with new car reviews site, Carbuyer. Launched in November 2010, the site’s digital display revenue in 2012 has grown by over 140% year-on-year, and is now Dennis’s second largest website by revenue. Its stablemate, Auto Express relaunched in July, and delivered its highest ever revenues, up 26% year-on-year for 2012.
Expert Reviews, which recently celebrated its 3rd birthday, has seen meteoric growth this year and is set for a record year end, hitting 1.6m monthly unique users in November, and December to-date up 120% year-on-year. Fellow tech site Know Your Mobile has been growing both in the UK and abroad, with global monthly unique users hitting over 3.5million, and new sites launched in Mexico and Brazil. The site was launched in 2007 as part of Dennis’s ‘skunkworks’ project, along with film, TV and games site Den of Geek, which hit 1.7m monthly uniques in November, up 68% year-on-year.
Paul Lomax, Chief Technology Officer at Dennis Publishing, said: “2012 has been a great year for Dennis Interactive, with so many of our pure-play launches bearing fruit in terms of both traffic and revenue, and solid performances from our multimedia brands . We’ve had a real boost from our recent investment in technology and user experience. Towards the end of 2011 we built an innovative platform on top of the open-source Drupal content management system (CMS). Since then we have relaunched three of our key websites, with six more going live early next year, and have launched eight new sites to boot. We hope to migrate all our remaining sites in 2013.”
Dennis Publishing’s in-house app development team, Dennis Media Factory has also seen great success this year, bringing in over £2.1m revenue for 2012. The 10-strong team of developers, designers, quality assurance and product managers, took a leap of faith in 2012 by completely redesigning its most successful app titles for touchscreen devices. These new titles use the same approach taken for The Week at the end of 2011, combining the best of native iOS and Android code with HTML5 to enable Dennis to launch easily on a wide range of phones and tablets. This move sees Dennis moving away from the PDF replicas and iOS specific interactive editions most publishers rely on. The Week, Auto Express and Men’s Fitness are all now underpinned by HTML5 technology. As well as enabling the company to launch on multiple platforms, this reduces issue size to around 20MB per issue and makes for a clean and uncluttered reading experience, which has seen a fantastic response from both readers and advertisers.
Dennis has seen great success with The Week digital edition, which it rolled out from iPad to iPhone and Kindle Fire, and now boasts over 2.8 million digital copies downloaded worldwide. Dennis is a digital subscriptions leader, using innovative subscriptions packages and selling both via the App Store and direct bundle subscriptions, where a reader receives both print and digital. The multi-platform strategy means digital subscriptions on The Week are growing at 10% month on month.
Women’s Fitness magazine was the 5th most downloaded app on Newsstand, and digital subscriptions for PC Pro Enhanced have grown 40% issue on issue since launch.
Alex Watson, Head of App Development at Dennis Publishing, said: “We have learnt a lot this year and have seen some great successes. We’ve built our own inhouse development team and been really aggressive about pushing the boundaries of HTML5 to ensure that we are able to get our content onto any device a reader might have. The response to our new generation of digital publications has been terrific - we’ve served millions of issues, we’re seeing readers paying for subscriptions and advertisers are beginning to see the possibilities this kind of publishing offers.”
