UNIMEDIA is the most popular news site in the Republic of Moldova.
Founded in 2007, Unimedia is by far the most popular news site in The Republic Of Moldova. With over 8.000.000 monthly page views, Unimedia is daily visited by every third person in the country (as for august 2020). That is huge!
In December 2014 the site was transferred to the actual owner, S.C. MIRAZA S.R.L. This transfer started a two-year journey, involving changing of web developing companies, digital platforms, and site experiments. After a two year headache, stuck in the middle of changing platforms, Unimedia found us and this was a beginning of a coding saga.
Back in 2016, UNIMEDIA had 4 main problems:
The goal was to solve these issues, implementing them gradually, step by step, ALWAYS supporting all working previous version. Fortunately, the support of some ancient functionality was eventually dropped, in 2020 :)
We started with the layout design and functionality, creating an agnostic frontend environment, that would help us switch to a new (any) backend platform. Then, we started to add different microservices that are assisting the editorial workflow, and finally, we switched in the backend to a headless CMS. During this adventure, we implemented a series of pretty challenging solutions.
Trend
We strongly believe that the huge amount of information that comes from different news channels makes reading only wanted news outdated - you always want to know "what do others consider important" and what is important "for the majority now". And we were right - our trending microservice/widget has THE HIGHEST RECIRCULATION RATE, according to Google Analytics.
Journalist's KPI
We believe in constructive competitivity and the daily written amount of news or the traffic data are making the "constructive" part difficult. That is why we have developed a comprehensive solution that takes into account: the number of news published today, social interactions, time spent on the site, the number of multimedia / embedded elements included in the text, the number of errors found, etc. All this became The "U" Index of performance.
Smart Push Notifications
Readers avoid subscribing to push notifications, fearing a flood of non-useful news. We created an autonomous microservice, that is user management system agnostic. This service is observing users' activity on site, creating a reader's profile. Based on this profile, a subscribed user receives push notifications only if this news is in its zone of interest. That is why, in medium, there is only 1 unsubscription per month (vs 6000 subscriptions monthly)!
Promoting Comments
Unimedia has always had a very active community, generating a lot of comments. As usual, we thought that an agnostic self-promoting service would leverage social awareness to another level. So we created a system that takes the commenting madness from the site community to the Facebook fans, inviting them to participate in the discussion ON THE SITE, if the discussion on the site is reaching a certain level.