
How Huffington Post's Clever Traffic-Generation Machine Works - zacharye
http://www.mondaynote.com/2012/07/08/transfer-of-value/
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localhost3000
I once headed up content marketing for a small online publisher. It's a
horrible job. You spend half your day trying to come up with clever headlines
of an article you've at-best skimmed and the other half trying to game traffic
sources like reddit or fark or harassing other sites for a back-link. Content
is too cheap. Supply is enormous (huf po alone does 1000 posts a day!). So,
it's a race to the bottom with everyone producing crap. It'll eventually get
so bad that a larger market will open up for for-pay content like the nytimes
where you're guaranteed some level of quality. I think the traditional pubs
who can weather the storm will do just fine once we reach this point.

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wslh
May be what we need are new discovery tools? currently search engines, and
social media are the main discovery tools. I think that the long tail is
longer than it would "need" to be. There are excellent resources but difficult
to find.

I can think of new tools that can help:

\- Sentiment analysis for the masses implemented by a major search engine

\- Focused Web Crawlers

\- Tools to analyze authority in small communities. Currently authority
rankings give information about high popularity

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cafard
[http://www.theonion.com/articles/huffington-post-employee-
su...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/huffington-post-employee-sucked-into-
aggregation-t,27244/)

~~~
gcb
Let's see how many more Facebook reposts the hufpo title gets.

(yeah, i consider that the dumbest metric ever. Only even looked at by
bloggers and creative ad agencies who are clueless about market research)

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eli
It's rather unfair to use "number of comments" as a metric to compare between
sites. HuffPo has a culture of commenting and community while WSJ does not.

~~~
muhfuhkuh
WSJ has, from what I've seen of it, anyway, a _thriving_ community of lively
and animated discussion... as long as they post an article about President
Obama or the Democrats.

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quanticle
_After all, at the height of the Fourth Estate’s power, the population was
better informed than today’s Facebook cherry-pickers._

I want to take issue with that statement. I see it repeated in many places,
but usually it has either anecdotal evidence, or, in this case, no evidence to
back it up. Was the population better informed when traditional newspapers
were at their peak (let's say from 1900 to 1960)? How would you measure such
an ambiguous term like "informed"? I think there's a lot of unanswered
questions about the "informedness" of the average person, and it's not at all
clear that the average person was more informed, in any sense, during the
height of newspaper dominance than they are today.

Let's also not forget that newspapers were often just as "bad" (in terms of
publishing trivial stories or publishing biased stories) as the Huffington
Post is today. You just need to look at the history of "yellow journalism" to
see it.

~~~
laconian
Empirical evidence aside, do you think a publishing model like HuffPo's can
possibly produce an informed populace? There's very little fact checking, no
followup if they get their facts wrong, and most of it's probably just
reworded press releases from PR lackeys anyhow.

~~~
quanticle
And how is that different from the "yellow journalism" of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century? If anything, the situation is a lot better now
since the barriers around publishing are much much lower than they were back
then. I fail to see how Ariana Huffington is any worse at journalism than
Pulitzer, Hearst, or, say, Murdoch.

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stfu
_Who is right? Who can look to the better future in the digital world ? Is it
the virtuous author carving language-smart headlines or the aggregator
generating eye-gobbling phrases thanks to high tech tools? Your guess. Maybe
it’s time to wake-up._

I suspect most of this is related to the pride of journalists have in
delivering a solid product. Questioning this is similar to asking why not all
news stations follow the example of FOX or MSNBC, because hey, they are
successful. Or why Woody Allen is making the same old boring movies, and that
he should instead switch over into producing reality formats as they are are
much cheaper to produce and probable getting at least similar viewer ratings.
I personally have to say that I dislike the rewriting practice, but then again
it has been always a core component of journalism.

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naner
There is something to be said about not giving too much control to the
algorithms when it comes to the news. HuffPo is loud, obnoxious, and frankly
it aggregates a lot of garbage. I'm glad we still have news sources like the
NYTimes, BBC, and WaPo that are more curated and subdued and not quite so
optimized for ads and SEO.

 _Like no one else, the HuffPo masters eye-grabbing headline such as these :
Watch Out Swimmers: Testicle-Eating Fish Species Caught in US Lake (4,000
Facebook recommendations), or: Akron Restaurant Owner Dies After Serving
Breakfast To Obama (3300 comments) or yesterday’s home:LEPAGE LOSES IT: IRS
‘THE NEW GESTAPO’ displayed in a 80 points font-size_

IMO, this is not something to be proud of.

HuffPo is a great money making site and a great entertainment site. It is a
terrible news site.

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retube
How/why is the HP allowed to repost content that isn't theirs?

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eli
They aren't reposting the WSJ's editorial, they're writing a blog post about
the article.

~~~
retube
yeah but they quote large tracts of material

~~~
wpietri
The way they can do this legally is fair use:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use>

The question of how much they can excerpt is a good one, and I presume
HuffPo's answer to that is, "As much as we can get away with."

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dangoldin
The other sites are also behind a pay wall and have a different monetization
strategy so looking at comment counts may not be the best comparison. That's
not to say that HuffPo's titles are not eye-catching but it may explain a bit
of the differences in the number of comments.

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benwerd
I don't know if that title's catchy enough. Here, I summarized the article in
300 words and rewrapped it for you:

Inside Huffington Post’s traffic machine: the algorithm that’s killing
traditional media [http://benwerd.com/blog/2012/07/09/inside-huffington-
posts-t...](http://benwerd.com/blog/2012/07/09/inside-huffington-posts-
traffic-machine-the-algorithm-thats-killing-traditional-media/)

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joshmaker
Does anyone know where they pull there SEO data? Are all the sites doing this
sort of thing using their own bespoke SEO algorithms or are there third party
API solutions for this market? If not, that could be a valuable service.

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gcb
Nothing new about brown press.

A little demodé even.

And i bet $5 nobody here ever landed on it's pages.

