Vorterix is a relatively young media company that was founded in 2012 aimed to always stand on the avant-garde side of technology.

The company started by opening a radio station combined with a world-class concert venue known as “Vorterix Theater”. But, from the very outset, Vorterix was conceived as a digital media company that happened to have a radio station, not the other way around.

Vorterix was born digital in a digital world.

Always looking for the next challenge

Vorterix continuously stood defiant of the industry’s status quo. Mario Pergolini, the company’s founder and also a Dift.co partner, is a risk-taker that understands the value of an MVP and of the learnings that can be obtained from trying, failing, and trying again. For instance, when he proposed a streaming-first radio station, the idea was received with skepticism by most of his peers. Nowadays, it’s unthinkable for a radio to lack a live-streaming feature.

In that vein, Vorterix stands as our playground to challenge the current state of affairs. Whenever we embark on a defying project, we count on Vorterix as a platform to validate our hypothesis. For example, Vorterix was one of the earliest adopters of Ingame, our gamification platform, and our own radio solution suite was first-tested with this company before being deployed to additional 5 radio stations of Argentina.

Reciprocally, Vorterix counts on us to work on the daring question: what’s the future of radio?

What’s the future of radio?

As puzzling as it may sound, this is the question Pergolini has been asking himself for decades. Of course no one has the answer, but something is clear: content is king. The key is to develop technologies, platforms and formats with the objective of boosting the potential of their contents.

Since day one, Vorterix has stood out for delivering a wide diversity of contents. These extend from the high-quality streaming of shows that range from Foo Fighters and Pearl Jam, to the production of original documentaries such as the critically acclaimed “Tsunami”, which revolves around Indio Solari’s latest concert of 2016 that was attended by 200 thousand people. This is why Vorterix is not just another radio station, but a proper media company, with the capability of not only producing its contents but also distributing them.

So, whatever the future of radio may be, a great deal can be learned from Vorterix. Its story shows us that a possible future of the industry lies in developing true content powerhouses.

Anyway, an unresolved challenge remained in early 2016: once a radio turns into a full-fledged media company, what is the best way to present its capabilities?

Striking the balance between design and creative chaos

In early 2016, Vorterix website’s challenge was to display a vast diversity of contents in a way that was clear and understandable for its users.

We had to find a way to let the radio streaming, editorial articles, documentaries and recorded concerts coexist in a mindful manner. So we started by working on the identity of the many shows the radio had, and developed a blog format so that producers could upload their contents in written form and not just in audio fragments.

The design process was differentiated between devices and designed according not only to their capabilities but also to how they are actually used by users. For instance, while on desktop we focused on optimizing content consumption, on mobile we concentrated on boosting interactions between the radio station and its listeners.

Due to the fact that social media had become one of the main drivers of the website’s traffic, we opted for developing a new website to serve as a hub for all the editorial content that the different shows generated.

The hardest part was to understand the importance that each type of content had and the way it resonated with users. Our team was conscious that modifying the site’s user flow implied the risk of changing something that already worked and consequently alienate existing, loyal users.

But seriously, what is the future of radio?

The main challenge that any media or broadcasting company faces is how to monetize its contents. Meanwhile, consumers are becoming less influenced by commercials than they are by original contents. For this reason, it is essential to tell stories that ring close to the brand’s values.

That’s where media companies can play a fundamental role: by generating contents for brands that are greatly valued by their audiences.

What this means is that brands can produce original contents with immense intrinsic value, instead of relying on the outdated and plainly annoying trick of product placement. At Dift, we believe that the best way to monetize a medium is to generate contents with added value that enrich the final users’ experience.

As a media company evolves and diversifies, it may become increasingly chaotic. This is perfectly natural, and brings forward the need of finding an equilibrium point. Every once in a while, these organizations need to take a close look at what they are producing and judge if its displayed in a way that makes sense to their audiences.

We don’t know what the next step for Vorterix will be but, for the time being, we need to learn as much as we can from its latest developments. This means to profoundly understand the way users interact with the new website and identify, if any, the shortcomings of our design.

Our goal was and still is to clearly display the vast diversity of contents Vorterix produces, while striving to avoid narrowing its identity to a mere radio station and alienating the users from what they learned to love and enjoy everyday.

By the way, you can check Vorterix’s website by clicking here.