Fox News Unveils Revamped Website

Fox News has unveiled an overhauled version of its website, its first major redesign in over five years. The revamp is designed to push more notifications of live and breaking video news to readers, and above all, get visitors to log in to the site using their cable TV credentials.

Rather than trying to maximize pre-roll advertising or build a social audience that can be targeted with branded video content, Fox News wants to encourage these logins so it can build a stronger picture of its audience across television and digital.

“We want to motivate people to authenticate,” said John Fiedler, Fox News’ svp of digital. “We’re going to make a strong push, starting with this design, to get people to register.”

John Fiedler

According to DigiDay, the last time Fox News overhauled its website was in 2012, or roughly 7,000 years ago in internet time. Since then, video has become critically important to media companies, with some publishers, including its sister company Fox Sports, essentially turning their homepages into big walls of video.

Cable broadcasters like ESPN and CNN have tried to figure out how to get their readers to log in with their cable credentials, which would allow the companies to target their audiences across devices.

“You can get to know a lot about a logged-in user,” Fiedler said.

To nudge people in that direction, the new version of Fox News’ homepage has dedicated space in the top left corner to a live feed from Fox News’ cable broadcast. It will also use a redesigned notification banner to notify visitors when something notable is happening in real time on the channel; if a visitor clicks on that link and is sent to a stream, she will be asked to log in.

Redesigning homepages is always risky. But for Fox News, the stakes are especially high. While the site’s traffic is healthy — it welcomed over 82 million unique users in July, according to comScore — nearly half of its monthly visitors head to the homepage directly, according to Fiedler. They also spend a lot of time on the site; the average site visit to FoxNews.com lasts over six minutes, according to SimilarWeb estimates.