ninemsn has revamped its popular Messenger product in a bid to increase advertising opportunities and allow users to customise content to suit their mood.
Messenger Today, a special page that pops up every time users log into their Messenger accounts, is ninemsn’s second most popular entry point into its network, following the ninemsn homepage, and generates 67 million page views from its three million visitors per month.
The new page includes breaking news, entertainment, sports updates, competitions and a video carousel.
Michael Stevenson, director of sales at ninemsn, said this was the first major revamp to the product in two years and was aimed at increasing the ability of users to customise the content on demand. Users are able to drag a marker along a sliding scale from “work” to “play” to dynamically customise the type of content on the page.
Set to “play”, for example, the top news item is a Paris Hilton story, but set to “work”, a story on the missing toddler Madeleine McCann appears.
New advertising formats include over-the-page ads and a new expandable rectangle ad, but, most exciting of all, according to Stevenson, is the new ability to reskin the background of the page.
“For the launch we’ve reskinned the page running a promotion with Justin Timberlake creative,” said Stevenson.
As Messenger collects a range of demographic information on its users, advertisers are able to target their campaigns based on age, sex, occupation and geographical location.
In May 2007, Messenger reached 40% of the entire Australian active online population, facilitating 1.3 billion conversations between its 4,369,000 users, according to ninemsn’s own data.
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