Vox Creative
Vox Product's 2016 Year in Review
This was another year of the Engineering, Design, Product Management, QA, and Support teams collaborating to empower creators, create satisfying audience experiences, and meet new business challenges. In the past 12 months, that included launching the industry-leading marketplace Concert, revolutionizing the approach to emerging media platforms by creating the Storytelling Studio, and successfully relaunching Recode, Curbed, Racked, and The Verge. Better still, Vox Product improved the speed and experience across Vox Media’s content and ad platforms to serve audiences more quickly than ever.
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Finalist, Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation, Online Journalism Awards: Autotune
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63%
faster content load time than 2015
4
brands relaunched
8
brands launched on Unison
40,000
commits to Chorus
25%
growth in team members
Largest Premium-Quality Marketplace Launched
Created with NBCUniversal, this industry-leading partnership pairs Vox Media's smart ad products with premium-quality content to offer brand marketers high-value audiences. In less than nine months, Concert boasts more than 40 brand partners and an audience reach that includes 88% of all millennials online. The ad products now run across 26 sites total across Vox Media and NBCUniversal, as well as 18 non-Vox Media sites including Google AMP and Facebook Instant Articles..
Relaunched Four Brands
Four Vox Media brands — Recode, Curbed, Racked, and then The Verge — enjoyed relaunches in 2016, premiering fresh new looks, refocused editorial strategies, evolved visuals, and faster load times for audiences across every platform.
Constant Updates Produce 63% Faster Load Time
Vox Product tirelessly works improve the user experience for our audience, and in 2016, that effort produced an average of 63% faster loading of content across all Vox Media brands. In addition to incremental improvements, this work focused on serving images and advertisements, while laying the groundwork to move all brands to HTTPS (and HTTP/2) in 2017.
Meet the Groundbreaking Storytelling Studio
The brand new Storytelling Studio pushes visual storytelling to its limits by working at the intersection of product, analytics, and all editorial teams — and always putting the user first. In just six months, this studio collaborated to publish Vox Hillary Clinton essay and Trump Tax feature, Racked’s first major foray into men’s fashion, Curbed’s "10 Streets and Define America," and Eater and Vox Creative’s MOFAD City Guides.
Launched Our Brands on AMP and Instant Articles
Vox Product launched all eight Vox Media brands on AMP, making it easier and faster than ever for our audiences to find stories through search. Our Revenue Operations team also worked with Facebook to incorporate our high-performing creative ad formats, technology, and ad tech platform to Instant Articles.
Hosted Community Events for Creativity
Vox Product hosted several successful events, including the third annual Pixel Punch design battle. We also held the inaugural Color Coded Hackathon, a multi-day event that provided a safe space for Creatives of Color to work on meaningful projects that would benefit their own communities.
Exciting Product Innovations at Vax ‘16
At this year's Product offsite, Vax, the teams spent a week in Chicago developing solutions to some of Vox Media's colleagues' and customers' biggest pain points. Highlights included Tonr, an app built "to create filters that affirm that black, brown and other skin tones are beautiful," the creators told Fortune.
Created Open Source Accessibility Resource
The Product and People Operations teams crafted a set of publicly available Accessibility Guidelines that provide comprehensive instructions on how to create accessible content and tools. These tools help teams across the company take steps towards ensuring that the content on our sites will be accessible to people with varying abilities.
Relentlessly Iterated on Chorus
The Product Team is always improving Chorus, Vox Media's proprietary content management system. But this year, we ensured that articles load 50% faster, introduced cross-network single sign-on, obliterated technical debt, and improved security. For our creators, we added real-time simultaneous editing and the ability to publish simultaneously to our own websites as well as to Google AMP, Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News, and more.
Vast Improvements to Ad Products Capabilities
We created new backend infrastructure for our ad tech platform, Hymnal, and launched Creative Intelligence, a Hymnal capability that can predict what ad design components will resonate with different segments of users. This year we created 8,000 ad designs, launched five new prelude formats and three new Athena formats, and made significant improvements across formats, e.g., standardizing our preamble bar with Concert branding. We also relaunched the Seller Resource center, which houses 657 opportunities and was searched 22,256 times this year.
A (Fast!) Helping Hand
Vox Media’s support team replied to 8,919 user requests from the Vox Media family this year, quickly offering help with products or tools. And it gets better — they’re fast: handling requests in under five minutes, on average, and tackling nearly 50% of requests within one minute.
Hosted OpenNews Fellow
Pietro Passarelli joined Vox Product in 2016 as a Knight-Mozilla OpenNews fellow and built an open source tool to enable faster and easier editing of video interviews, reducing transcription time from hours to minutes.