News.com.au, News Digital Medias online news centre, is undergoing a relaunch. The new site will feature a new, edgier logo, and ‘drag and drop’ technology to personalise what news you want to view on the site. A more sophisticated content management system is also on the cards.

This ability to allow customers to customise their content is becoming common, with a number of sports and entertainment sites relaunching with similar technology to make sites more user friendly.

The site also aims at creating new advertising opportunities, with more video placements, takeover-style advertisements – a progression away from banners to larger ads – and the opportunity to ‘skin’ pages, or run watermark-style advertising on them.

“From an advertiser point of view we’ll really open up each of the (news) story pages to advertisers in a new creative way,” says Michael Robinson, chief executive of media partner NDM.

Robins indicates that money is “starting to move” from free-to-air TV to online, beginning with youth demographics, although TV sales teams often had the chance to get in first to have those conversations with advertisers.

“There are a lot of (executives) looking at their marketing budgets and were going into the negotiating period for free-to-air TV. Free-to-air struggles to get the youth demographics whereas online is strong. We are seeing the money start to move,” explains Robinson.