
Washington Post’s ‘Bandito’ Tool Optimizes Content for Clicks - bootload
http://www.wsj.com/articles/washington-posts-bandit-tool-optimizes-content-for-clicks-1454960088
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blatherard
The WaPo-owned slate.com has been doing frequent renaming of articles for a
while now. I suspect they've been a testbed for Bandito or a similar system.
One very frustrating side-effect is that I am often drawn to click on the same
article multiple times. That's because it shows markedly different headlines
for the same article, sometimes even on the same page simultaneously.

Case in point, as of right now, slate shows a headline: "What Bernie Sanders'
Victory Means"

and lower on the page: "It's Official: Bernie Sanders Just Won New Hampshire"

both of which link to the same article, which sports the quotidian title
"Bernie Sanders Wins New Hampshire".

The two front-page headlines are not just tweaked variants of each other, they
sound like substantially different articles, one a reporting-the-news article
and the other an analysis piece.

This is super-frustrating to me, because I keep feeling like the site is
wasting my time and attention. It's starting to drive me away from slate
overall. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens to the WaPo.

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apendleton
Not disagreeing with the headline behavior, but just FYI, WaPo doesn't own
Slate. They were both once owned by the Washington Post Company, but the
Company sold only the paper to Bezos, and renamed itself to Graham Holdings
shortly thereafter. It still owns Slate.

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JulianMorrison
Is Your Newspaper Iterating Down To Buzzfeed? One Weird Trick To Get More
Readers.

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captainmuon
So this tool picks the title that gets more often clicked on. If they'd only
use it for one article or section of their site, this section probably get an
advantage compared to the rest. But they want to use it on all articles to get
an advantage over the competitors.

I wonder if this actually improves absolute engagement, or whether it just
improves engagement with each post relative to the others.

I fear they are optimizing the wrong variable. If they don't take into account
click counts for competitor's web sites, then they will have a lot of
"optimized" click-baity headlines. Those will always win in A-B tests against
non-optimized WP headlines, but not necessarily against competitor's articles,
and especially it is not said that they will increase the total traffic to the
WP.

In the worst case, every link will say "Click here to receive your free
prize!"...

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huac
'bandito' likely comes from multi-armed bandit, a technique for implementing
a/b tests
([https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2844870?hl=en](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2844870?hl=en))

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joelthelion
Also used for game AI, like the MCTS that dominated computer go for ten years.

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rebelde
I imagine that the only reason that the title is not "How Washington Post’s
‘Bandito’ Tool Optimizes Content For Clicks" is that the editor of the WSJ
rejected it.

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ucaetano
I was expecting the headline to be something in the line of "Find out the
shocking way this Amazon-bankrolled newspaper is getting more clicks!"

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nkrisc
Well we didn't want to pay for journalism. This is how we pay now.

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mynewtb
Speak for yourself. I was bombarded with free content for two decades, they
didn't ask me for money.

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wangarific
Testing titles isn't that innovative on the whole but coupled with different
teasers on the homepage and automating that test seems to be something you
don't often see.

For example, on the homepage now the primary headline is "Trump, Sanders roll
to victory." It actually goes to the same story as "Jumbled finish could keep
GOP field from thinning." I suspect bandito would test headlines but also
integrate into which story to put in the headline to increase engagement.

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rkangel
I find this unsurprising. I'd always assumed that some of the more clickbait-
ey 'news' sites were doing this already.

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wangarific
I've always thought that between clicks and SEO, this is why the URLs of
articles sometimes can vary so widely from the title.

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tbrick855
More details are in a blog post
[https://developer.washingtonpost.com/pb/blog/post/2016/02/08...](https://developer.washingtonpost.com/pb/blog/post/2016/02/08/bandito-
a-multi-armed-bandit-tool-for-content-testing/)

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decisiveness
The first person the article gives credit to is Bezos, asserting his presence
influenced the tool. Is it safe to doubt he had anything to do with this? I
would expect this type of tooling from any web publication with in house
engineering staff.

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ada1981
There have been wordpress plugins that do this for years. What is surprising
is that one of the largest media companies in the world just figured this out,
when internet marketing shmoes have been doing this with $20 php scripts for
years.

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untog
People were aware of it, but considered it the domain of internet marketing
shmoes. Sadly, the media keeps losing money, so one by one those principles
get compromised.

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AznHisoka
So... this is just A/B testing? What's so newsworthy about this? Would've been
really something if it could optimize content that's not going to be seen by
100,000 people. Kinda hard to A/B test something that will only have 1000
pageviews in its lifetime.

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alanh
You seem to be lacking perspective. The deterioration of both journalism and
basic respect for the reader isn’t “just” anything.

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AznHisoka
Actually, my comment was from a different perspective. The article seemed to
talk about the technology as it was complex, and ground-breaking. I'm saying..
it's not so special - it's just A/B testing, not some rocket science thought
up from Mr. Bezos. I actually agree with you - I hate this too.

