
A Lot of Top Journalists Don't Look at Traffic Numbers - Kopion
http://blog.hubspot.com/opinion/journalists-dont-look-at-traffic-numbers?curator=MediaREDEF
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jonnathanson
Journalism is in desperate need of a return to first principles, particularly
on the monetization side. Want to know why everyone wrestles with the do-we-
or-don't-we-optimize-for-traffic problem? Because almost all publications
treat "traffic" as a homogeneous set. The ur-audience. Eyeballs are eyeballs
are eyeballs in the eyes of most publications, and in the eyes of the
advertisers who spend there. Sure, a lot of pubs will pay lip service to how
"upscale," "educated," and ostensibly high-value their readership is -- if
only to put a premium on impression costs. But the truth is, few people are
being very smart about segmentation. We're still being ruled by top-level
traffic analytics.

It should be readily apparent that audience size, uber alles, does not yield
the best content -- nor does it yield the best audience. I would bet that
10,000 legitimately high-quality readers for a specialized blog post are worth
more _to advertisers_ than 1 million readers of a tossed-off Buzzfeed poll.
The problem is, advertisers don't know that, and nobody's making an effort to
educate them. Everyone's still chasing impression levels and scale, presuming
that conversions will always be awful.

The pubs who break this cycle will be the ones who invest in high-quality
journalism _and_ high-quality analytics _and_ innovative ad models. It's time
for us to completely rethink the journalism ad model. Only then will we change
things.

I apologize if I sound like I'm on a soapbox here. It's just that I've spent
the better part of this past year wrestling with this problem at various
publications, and close to a decade wrestling with it in the TV business
before that. The Homogeneous Audience Theory is one of the great, untackled
problems in media today. Everyone knows audiences can be segmented. Few people
do it. Instead, people assume conversion percentages will always be a tiny
fraction, and thus, their job is to multiply that fraction by a huge set of
eyeballs. Let's reengineer that equation in favor of the conversion
multiplier, by way of building more purposeful and curated audiences.

~~~
JetSpiegel
I fully agree.

This is paradoxal, considering the amount of data Google has on you. Either
they can't find that easily with data mining or they just don't care.

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GigabyteCoin
Could it also be that the editors do not want writers to know their full
worth?

If any of their writers gets a large enough following (and knows it), they
could easily go rogue and blog under their same name.

It's much tougher to say "No, I will not stay late again tonight. You n'know
what? My last 10 stories had over 2 million readers a piece and I've had it
with this company. I'm going off on my own." when you have no idea how popular
or valuable your writing is.

~~~
cushychicken
The New York Times factors in expenses associated with reporting stories into
its employees salaries, and requires them to pay for all expenses incurred to
report on something themselves. The reasoning is that, without any chance of
needing to accept external money, the journalists have no motivation besides
their own interest to cover a story. This, to me, sounds like the digital
equivalent of that - trying to minimize sources of bias or external influence
of coverage.

That being said - what you describe is certainly a convenient side effect of
the policy.

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thom
Ten or more years ago, I worked in the 'new media' department of the UK's
largest regional news group. It was a fascinating time to be a techie in a
news organisation, because it was fairly obvious to us that one day the
internet would eat every aspect of the business - advertising, classifieds and
eventually even news itself.

The websites we had were rickety old classic ASP apps (remember when people
wrote JavaScript on the server?!) One of my biggest projects was building the
platform for analytics on all our pages. The only reason the business wanted
this was so they could get their traffic numbers properly audited to sell
advertising more easily, but we wanted to provide more value than that. We had
reports showing the most popular stories by day, month, category etc, as you'd
expect, and we thought perhaps this would be useful on the print side of the
business too. The most wildly popular stories were exactly what you'd expect
("Stab victim vicar's child porn shame", that sort of rubbish) but obviously
the front pages of the papers were all about roundabouts and fences falling
down.

Every month we gave them the data, every month they ignored it when making
editorial decisions. Partly just because nobody really cared about the
internet or what it thought, partly, I would hope out of some sense of public
service or long term gain. Rounds and rounds of job losses later, I'm not sure
if they're doing anything differently.

Either way, it's fascinating that a decade on, in the face of much more data,
and much more existential risk to individual news organisations, that this
same argument can still play out the same way, even in businesses that are
more or less _native_ to the internet.

~~~
untog
_(remember when people wrote JavaScript on the server?!)_

Wait, I'm doing that right now.

And chasing popularity is not necessarily a good thing for news. Despite the
noise made on HN and the like, Snowden did not pull in the pageviews. The
missing plane, however, continues to pull in readers/viewers after weeks with
no new info.

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jhanschoo
This reminds me a lot of a previous HN post (Observations from a Tipless
Restaurant):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6126926](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6126926)

They observed that serving staff who were thinking about the tips they would
be getting fared worse in their service as the servers would not be able to
concentrate as well on the orders that they were taking. A similar dynamic
should be at work here.

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showerst
I think this has a bit to do with what a media organization's strategy is. If
you're going for 'advertising supported, big pageviews', then it's critical to
share that info with writers. The logical consequence of this is buzzfeed.

If your strategy is to provide a specific value to some audience, then it gets
murkier. Can seeing what's popular help your editors allocate resources toward
what people actually want? Sure. But it's quite possible that the boring, low
pageview stories are the ones that are _useful_ to some group of people that
are paying the bills by subscribing or being targeted by advertisers.

People like to rag on the old media model where a patrician editor decided
what was 'fit to print' and thus defined what information got published, and
it's good that we're past that. But if you just go by analytics, you end up
with an organization driven by lists, quizzes, shock stories and cute animals.

------
arasmussen
I think this is awesome. I hate articles that have catchy headlines just to
become as viral as possible. Stuff like "Follow these 5 tricks and you'll
become rich and famous!!!" Just because the numbers go up doesn't necessarily
mean it's a better user experience. I've become a firm believer over the past
few years that user sentiment is far more important the pure number of users.

This lets the writer focus on writing a quality article rather than a popular
one. Those are two very different things and I strongly prefer the former.

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AngrySkillzz
So that's why Gawker and BI articles are so awful.

~~~
habosa
Gawker is the worst by far. They really are the web's tabloid. I officially
dropped Gizmodo from my RSS feed when I saw them do an entire article on why
you should by The Wire on Blu Ray from Amazon and they attached their
affiliate Link. That was the entire content of an "article".

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pothibo
Having Business Insider as an example in support of articles written with
analytic is ironic.

BI is full of cheap articles that tries to bait you to read articles with
pretty much no content in it.

~~~
dmethvin
It's not ironic at all, it's the intended consequence.

Thoughtful, in-depth, well-researched articles are not only more time-
consuming to write, they're more time-consuming to read and that's not what a
lot of people want as they browse aimlessly on the web to fill their work
breaks.

You'll get better traffic from a catchy headline and a few emotion-inspiring
comments, and that can give you the page views needed to display enough ads to
get some accidental clicks. The shorter the article, and the catchier the
headline, the more pages they'll click. That's what the analytics will tell
you.

This isn't a new concept. Since the 1950s, William Gaines of Mad Magazine fame
refused to do a study of their readers because they didn't want to begin
pandering to 13-year-old boys (the presumed audience). Instead, he wanted the
writers and artists to do what they thought was funny.

------
cratermoon
"The Verge"

"Top Journalists"

Nope.

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snowwrestler
The irony of _Dan Lyons_ writing about traffic whoring is almost too much to
take.

