Founded in 1966, Maeil Business Newspaper is owned by Maekyung Media Group and is the largest economic newspaper in Korea. Like many of the major Korean newspapers, it has faced digitization leading online media to overwhelm the offline market, leaving many traditional media outlets facing a challenge to adapt and modernize.

Korean readers have a strong preference for consuming digital news content from local online portals, thus article distribution on portals is the top priority in digital news strategy for most media companies.

As dependence on portals has grown, the need for publishers to diversify their content channels and strengthen their own digital capabilities has risen. News outlets have struggled to keep pace with these changes, with many being driven to put generating advertising revenue ahead of user experience.

Maeil Business Newspaper needed a new digital presence that could help it protect and grow its own owned and operated digital platforms by putting readers first. As a first step, Maeil Business Newspaper set out to increase engagement with readers through improving the user experience on their news site.

A new platform was created with the help of digital specialist agency, Spadecompany, who assisted in integrating UX/UI research and enhancements into the revitalized site design. It’s now able to combine the characteristics of Maeil Business Newspaper with an improved design built from distinctive brand identity, a magazine layout, modernized typefaces and an immersive view. This new look is improving the experience for the digital readers it’s looking to attract and engage.

The impact of the new design is already apparent. Unique Visitors (UV) and Pageviews (PV) of the refreshed and user-friendly Maeil Business News’ digital platform have significantly increased. Within 6 months from the launch of the new site, Maekyung saw an increase of 20.3% in average daily UV and 8.6% uplift in PV.