Overview

Before Destination Pages existed, content editors at Fox Nation had very limited curation options. They could create two types of carousels: show carousels (featuring shows and movies) and video carousels (featuring individual videos). These could only be placed on the Home page or the Shows page (which was basically a second, lesser version of the Home page).

I brought this pain point to our VP of Product and ideated with his team on a solution. My initial idea of letting content editors build custom landing pages evolved into what the feature became: Destination Pages.

What Are Destination Pages?

Destination Pages are editorially curated landing pages that can be featured as tile chicklets throughout the app, or as an item within the masthead. They give content editors the flexibility to create themed pages around any topic, acquisition, or campaign, across all device types: web, mobile, and connected TV.

For example, when the production team acquired a collection of classic Clint Eastwood movies, content editors could spin up a "Classic Clint" Destination Page featuring all of that content. The page could be promoted as a chicklet or within the masthead on the Home screen or deep linked directly from social media, email campaigns, or even on-air promos on the Fox News channel.

This feature created an entirely new marketing funnel. Destination Pages were accessible in front of the paywall, trailers could be watched without subscribing, and users only hit the paywall when they tried to watch longform content.

CMS Experience

A new Destination Pages section was added to the CMS. Content editors could navigate there, create a new page, fill out the required metadata, and build out content carousels to populate the page. They also uploaded images for the page, which could be used as tile chicklets or featured in the masthead across the app.

I pushed for two approaches to content curation. Editors could manually select content for each carousel, but they could also leverage a new category tag system that automatically pulled in content matching a specific tag. This was a quality-of-life feature that sped up the page-building process significantly.

The category tags we created for this feature ended up being useful beyond Destination Pages. We later used them to help train the embeddings model for our ML recommendations work, since they provided more granular tagging than genre tags alone.

Chicklets

The chicklets were a new carousel type that specifically featured Destination Pages. Content editors could manually place them wherever they wanted. One of these carousels ended up becoming the first thing right beneath the masthead on the Home page, because the feature was so versatile and effective.

Collaboration

I worked primarily with design, product, and engineering on this project. As the head of the content team and de facto product owner for Fox Nation, I relayed requirements to engineers and wrote up tickets for the senior PMs. For context, the product team's PMs were each assigned to a device type and worked across all business units, which left a gap in product ownership for Fox Nation that I filled.

From conception to production deployment, this feature took around one Program Increment (about a quarter).

Results

Destination Pages transformed content curation and the marketing funnel for Fox Nation. Content editors could get much more creative with how they positioned new content within the app. The CRM team spun up entire email campaigns around these pages, reaching an audience of millions. The social media team did the same across social platforms. And different Destination Pages would even get promoted directly on the Fox News channel, marketing them to a massive audience.

The feature helped boost unique viewing subscribers 5x within a year of launch.

Additional Thoughts

I'm really proud of the impact this project had on the platform! What started as a pain point I surfaced to leadership turned into a feature that fundamentally changed how Fox Nation curated content and marketed to users.