News Corp’s ongoing reinvention from an advertising “billboard” publisher to an “integrated shopfront” commerce company took another turn yesterday as it chases 40 per cent-plus revenue growth by finding purchasing intent signals among millions of its logged-in users. It then plans to clip the ticket from those online purchases by steering its readers to retailer ecom sites via product review content it creates in-house. 

News.com.au officially went live today with Checkout, a content and commerce initiative in which an independent team of circa 10 writers will research and write-up product reviews. Then News Corp’s affiliate marketing technology automates the matching of those products to ecom sites and retailers. 

News Corp is banking on the profile, “trust” and big audiences of news.com.au to cut through a sea of affiliate marketing swill via content marketing sites on the open web, built primarily to drive referral and affiliate fees and commissions to hungry online retail sites and marketplaces. 

A recent IAB ecommerce report showed 62 per cent of online shoppers have increased the time they spend researching products before they buy online as poor ecom experiences proliferate and more cautious spending patterns prevail.

Sticking broadly to its journalism roots, News Corp says its Checkout product reviews are selected and written by a team of independent journalists which the commercial team acknowledge can be “frustrating” but delivers the secret sauce for consumer credibility.

The publisher’s commercial team is lead by a former ecom exec at Wesfarmer’s-owned Catch, Adam Kron, while the editorial product review team sits under news.com.au’s editors. 

“Our editorial team is separated from Adam’s commerce team,” said Pippa Leary, News Corp Managing Director, Client Product. “That’s really key – it’s frustrating for us but it makes the user experience better. Clearly through Covid there was just an explosion of ecom and in particular, a whole lot of ecom marketplaces. They actually made the landscape more confusing for consumers and we know that after COVID, the amount of people who research before they buy, either online or offline, massively increased. Very few people buy anything now without researching.”

Leary said the idea behind news.com.au’s Checkout was to “really meet that need of people who want to do research, they're in the research phase of the purchase funnel.” She said these readers want to see independent reviews and recommendations, a trend spawned by bad online shopping experiences. 

“I don't know anyone who buys straight out of social media anymore because you've been burned so many times. So the job of our writers s to try and test this stuff so it's no ripoff.”

News Corp has publicly called out the swing by advertisers to cheap, programmatically bought ads and audiences in the past year via open exchanges like Google’s, at the expense of news sites producing expensive original content.

Part of the antidote is to swing to content that drives commerce and transactions via referral and affiliate marketing links, replicating the success of US publisher ventures like the The New York Times’ Wirecutter acquisition, The Wall Street Journal’s Buy Side and CNN’s Underscored. 

News.com.au’s “Checkout” launch is the company’s biggest push yet into content commerce and affiliate and referral marketing, which can deliver up to 20 per cent of a retailer’s e-commerce traffic

“It's very different to what we're used to doing,” Leary told Mi3.  “We've been a billboard advertising company and now we have to be an integrated shopfront. It's a completely different skill set.”

News Corp’s ecom lead Adam Kron told Mi3 there had been a flurry of online marketplaces launch through Covid which had since fizzled. Those that worked best tended to be run by an existing retailer. 

“Affiliate marketing is ubiquitous. Just about every retailer or brand these days has an affiliate network,” Kron said.

“Somewhere around five to 10 percent of a retailer’s total traffic will come from affiliate networks and it could be up to 20 per cent for discreet direct-to-consumer sites.”

Amazon, Google search and social and email campaigns are the other “big buckets” that drive users to an ecom site, he said. “What we’re doing with our independent content and product reviews means it's particularly high value traffic because you're coming from an environment that's hitting people in the research stage. They're obviously thoughtful consumers.”

Leary said News Corp had high growth ambitions for the venture. 

“Growth rates now are about 40-50 per cent on a smaller but fast growing base,” she said. “We've got pretty high growth expectations on this business because what happens is over time your SEO juice, your domain authority just grows and grows and grows. So it's a little bit like a virtuous circle these businesses, but you do have to be patient. As publishers, we want everything to just work overnight."

She said, "I think the lesson has been for us, anything that has a reliance on SEO takes time to build authority. And you've just got to stay the course. We’re already the number one referring publisher in Australia. We send a hell of a lot of clicks out of here off those affiliate links.”