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Dezeen
Dezeen’s audience is the global community of architecture and design professionals, who rely on the brand for the latest news and trends, an archive of reference material and for visual inspiration.
Dezeen’s revenue streams include display advertising, recruitment sales, and cross-platform brand collaborations. A Brexit-induced fall in the value of the pound hit Dezeen’s recruitment site hard, with a sharp downturn in UK recruitment revenue. To counter this challenge, it focused on growing its international revenue.
Dezeen grew and restructured the sales team from six to eight people and introduced a newly formed business development position, enabling it to react faster to the rapidly evolving media landscape. In addition, it shifted away from its traditional business model of standard display banners and focused on targeting key international, high-profile brands. It adopted a more consultative sales approach to create compelling editorial and video content. Dezeen also established social media as a new revenue stream.
Highlights from this new strategy included a live-event collaboration with Ikea, a global design competition with Samsung and a pioneering short-movie project with Mini.
International revenue growth was particularly strong, with China growing 99% to become the brand’s fastest growing recruitment revenue market, US revenue growing 66% without any US-based sales representatives and the Netherlands growing 60%.