10 Great Media Sites: Property Casualty360

By Charlotte Woolard

Summit Business Media overhauled its Web strategy in the property-casualty underwriters vertical, launching a centralized content portal in January that in a matter of months outperformed the five magazine-specific sites that had preceded it.

“Websites need to be scaled products that deliver the largest yet most targeted audiences,” said John Whelan, exec VP-media division at Summit. “The idea behind the portal was to converge the content and the brands into one site and give a 360 [-degree] view of the marketplace.”

The company pulled the websites of National Underwriter Property & Casualty, American Agent & Broker, Claims Magazine, Tech Decisions and Florida Underwriter under the PropertyCasualty360.com umbrella. The resulting site in April drew 126,664 unique visitors, an almost 15% increase over the combined performance of its magazine-specific predecessors. And that doesn't even account for visitors who went to more than one of the five sites in the same period last year. Page views more than doubled.

Summit developed the site on an open-source platform that the company believes will facilitate growth and accommodate the development of mobile offerings and other new products. The company now is focused on an engagement strategy that combines slideshows and video with traditional articles, and that soon may include user-generated content.

Originally posted on: 6/10/11