Future Publishing is repositioning its technology brand T3 to focus on e-commerce, according to Digiday UK.
The brand’s content includes men’s lifestyle areas such as fashion, culture, travel and fitness. E-commerce is expected to be the main revenue stream for T3 in future.
Future Publishing has around 50 titles covering specialist interests such as photography, tech, music and gaming. Revenues from e-commerce have increased by 72% from last year according to the publisher’s financial review. Income from e-commerce is now £6m ($8.1m) in the first half of 2017; 15% of total revenue.
T3 has been relaunched with a simpler, image-led design with fewer display ads, more prominent buy buttons and a redesigned user journey.
Zack Sullivan, operations and marketing director at Future said: “We’re moving away from ‘here’s the five best watches’ to ‘here’s how you can get the most out of this experience’. It’s an interesting shift in consumer behaviour to want to buy more experiences.”
Virtually all pages on T3 will now have an e-commerce element. For example, an article on Swiss watchmaking could link to a related article on Swiss versus French watchmaking, which in turn would link to an article on chronograph watches then a list of the best watches with ‘buy now’ links.
T3 is building more links with niche retailers. Currently, around half a million retailers are involved with its Shopify partnership and 45,000 API feeds come from Hawk, its proprietary e-commerce platform. Future takes a cut of around 2-10% from these purchases.
