Digital Commerce
Building out a new revenue stream
SUMMARY
Lead the Discovery Inc. Commerce web product team which has launched and scaled online shopping initiatives for Food Network, HGTV, TLC Me, TRVL, Discovery and Food.com. Over 2019, the team grew affiliate program revenue by +119% YoY, built a dozen CMS authoring components that allowed Editorial team to scale shopping content by +164% YoY and launched the first ever end-to-end customer journey reporting technology.
THE OPPORTUNITY
Discovery Inc.’s brands are undisputed authorities in the lifestyle space, such as Food Network for cooking, HGTV for home design and Discovery for exploring the world. Historically, revenue for the Digital Studios portfolio has come from digital advertising and sponsorships, leveraging the enormous 60MM unique users/month across online audiences to promote partners and brands. In 2018, the Digital Studios group prioritized a new revenue source – online shopping – with me at the helm overseeing a Product team that would convert our web visitors into shoppers.
Shoppable Storytelling
In order for our expert HGTV & Food Network editors to be able tell exciting shopping stories, our team created a suite of CMS components for publishing shoppable reviews, galleries and how-to articles.
In 2019 alone, Editors used these components to create 1,400+ pieces of shopping content.
Shop the Look room photos
Our team established a Shop the Look campaign in partnership with Wayfair in which items found in room photography on HGTV.com can be directly purchased.
This initiative alone has brought in $5MM for partners per year and helps our users turn room inspiration into action.
Shopping Hubs
In 2019, our team launched the first-ever dedicated shopping section on our brands for HGTV.com. This page includes all the bells and whistles our Editors need to turn our high-intent visitors into loyal shoppers.
The components in this section consistently see +30% CTR over others, and establish HGTV.com as a shopping destination.
Product Scrapers, Auto-Affiliation & Tracking
For an e-commerce business, it’s not enough for Editors to just hyperlink products in their stories. They need to create internal product records, manage varying merchant deals, and truly understand customer behavior.
Our team built a browser extension that made it super easy and fast for Editors to scrape the pricing and information from product pages online and automatically turn them into product records in our in-house database.
We built complex auto-affiliation scripts that allowed us to monetize merchants in our networks, while following best practices such as protecting direct merchant relationships and appending SEO no-follows.
We launched the first end-to-end customer journey tracking system through Trackonomics that allowed us to see how users landed on our site, what products they clicked through to and what finally got them to hit checkout.
THE RESULT
Over 2019, the Commerce team grew affiliate program revenue by +119% , drove merchant sales +31% and landed nearly 50 new commerce subscription campaigns. With exciting new Editorial tools, a rich new product record library and continuous component optimization, the future for Discovery’s Digital Studios commerce business looks bright, and has only just begun.
KUDOS
Design • Jeff Romaniuk • Sarah Hartley • Kristin Ingram • Lori Hoffman
Engineering • Christine Jones • Kevin Malone • Oleksandr Liakhov • David Hodge • Dan Silk • Harish Pateri • Prajjwal Kandel • Carlos Moran
Business & Content Chris Mainenti • Jennifer Cicatelli • Kelly Smith Trimble
