10 Great Media Sites: EETimes

By Nathan Lipkin

EETimes.com continues to grow with a new website focusing on community building. The site features user comments, message boards and guest posts from engineering experts. The website now averages 766,562 unique monthly visitors and about 5,000 monthly user comments.

The website's community building effort is aided by a new platform, created in July 2010, to make content accessible and keep readers involved. “The whole point was to really send a message to our community that their content is as important as ours,” said Karen Field, senior VP-content of UBM Electronics, which publishes EE Times. “It's almost as if now we have a virtual masthead of contributors.”

Field said the company was able to grow the website quickly through a collective marketing effort. EETimes.com sent an email to a list of people who might be interested in working as official moderators and asked others to submit content for the user-generated EE Life section. In addition to the emails, the company offered a $5,000 oscilloscope for the best article. Now, Field said only 20% of the comments come from the core people who were reached out to initially.

The new website has also impacted advertising. By increasing the number of registrations and contributors, the site has increased its attractiveness for advertisers. “We have definitely made it a more engaging site, and have wrapped our arms around the community and made it a two-way conversation,” Field said.