Context: Subscription and Ads CTR Improvement

All of us are consumers of content from one or the other news website. Some of us might be loyal to specific sources while some of us might land up based on the article.

Such websites, mainly rely on 2 sources of revenue: ads (owned, ad networks) and subscriptions.

However, News websites struggle with generating revenues what with the prevalence of aggregators (FB and Google) which serve free content to readers. Also the recent trend of byte sized news (Inshorts etc) mean that generating money from a news site has become more difficult.

Hence, In this challenge you will need to optimise flows for a popular news website - BloombergQuint.com (BQ) which directly can impact their business.

Part 1: Ads

Ads have been the main source of revenue for news websites. How crucial are ads for this type of business can be ascertained that many popular sites have more real estate for ads than the actual content :)

As a user, we all know how irritating it is but can they be shown to the user in a non-intrusive manner for BQ? And is there a way to improve click through rates? Can there be a fine balance between UX and the business goals?

(Please try to think on finer aspects and not just use terms such as ‘contextual ads’. Examples will help)

Part 2: Subscription flow

Subscriptions have been a relatively new mode of revenue and thus we believe it will be interesting for youto try out the subscription flow at BQ and find out ways to optimise the flow:

- Focus on simplifying the flow for users who are genuinely interested in subscribing

- Think of practical fixes and not major redesigns

- A good practice would be to check what global peers do and if there are elements that can be replicated

- How this can be optimized for a daily/frequent user and a new user

While there are several optimisations possible you need to prioritise and share the TOP 3 most impactful and practical ones only for each of the above parts.

The hook for this flow can be seen at the bottom of the sample article shared.

Sample Article: https://www.bloombergquint.com/mutual-funds/ulips-stagnate-as-investors-switch-to-mutual-funds

Screenshots:

Mobile view:

Laptop view:

Expected output:

1. The submission can be a document, wireframe, a note capturing the improvements that you would like to suggest 

2. Redesigns are not essential. We are not looking for beautifully created screens. Annotated screens will do

3. You can do improvement for either laptop or mobile view

Notes: 

1. Pit-stop submission(optional): Monday midnight. This is to clarify any doubts and help improve your final submissions

2. BloombergQuint is NOT hosting this challenge. This is just a learning exercise