Yesterday, Perfect Market, a company that "helps publishers create value from their online content with little effort and no risk1" released a study that's been getting quite a bit of attention. The study analyzes the relative traffic value per visit of several types of content, coming to the conclusion2 that "while the Lindsay Lohan sentencing and other celebrity coverage drove significant online traffic for major news publishers, articles about unemployment benefits, the Gulf oil spill, mortgage rates and other serious topics were the top-earning news topics based on advertising revenue per page view."
Coverage included the New York Times' Traffic Bait Doesn't Bring Ad Clicks, Columbia Journalism Review's Celebs are Loud, but Hard News Pays, Nieman Journalism Lab's Public Interest News Can Be More Valuable to Publishers than Traffic Bait and Search Engine Land's Hard News Pays More than Chasing Search Trends.
I'm worried for a few reasons:
- What's the branding value of those stories? Do they drive up awareness of the publications that authored them? Do they increase return visits?
- What other actions do those visitors take? Are they more likely to subscribe to an RSS feed? To share those stories on social networks? To get email notifications?
- Do these stories drive links that then help other, lower link-earning content rank well in search engines? The goal of linkbait, after all, is often to drive branding, links and sharing rather than being directly monetizable. Plenty of consultants on viral content creation even recommend removing ads to drive up sharing and linking activities.
Granted, from a personal perspective, I love the idea that writing about celebrity gossip and other "soft news" isn't profitable and therefore might be less prevalent in the future. It's purely opinion, but I suspect that many share my sentiment that the United States' major media outlets are far too focused on shallow reporting of topics (like those mentioned in the Perfect Market analysis) that deserve far less attention than, say, understanding what caused the mortgage crisis, who's spending money on elections and why, the success other nations have had in dealing with crime, poverty, drugs, multiculturalism, etc.
However, anytime a skin-deep, single-metric analysis like this makes its way into major publications, it has an effect on content publication that's not necessarily positive. If executives, editors and journalists start using singular metrics rather than deep analyses of data to make decisions, their publications will suffer and their content and marketing budgets will be misallocated.
If Perfect Market (or another source) could show:
- The value of the links brought in from those stories
- The branding impact of the visits generated
- The value of sharing activities from those visits
I'd be far more inclined to agree with the conclusions the press is reporting.
If you can't fully/accurately analyze the true lifetime value to your publication of so-called "bait" (and I don't just mean celebrity-obsessed soft news, but a broader group of creative, traffic-driving pieces), that's OK. Just don't presume a single metric like "ad click value" combined with "page views" will give you the whole story. The web is all about providing data, and you're cheapening your own value when you cut corners to this extent.
BTW - I don't mean to cast all the blame on Perfect Market - they did some reasonable data analysis and shared the findings. I wish it had included a bit more caveats, but their job is promoting their work. I'm more concerned with how the media treated the story - reporting, exaggerating and not bothering to dig deeper. Just look at the opening lines of the NYTimes piece3:
Sure, articles about Lindsay Lohan’s repeat trips to rehabilitation and Brett Favre’s purported sexual peccadilloes generate loads of reader traffic, but do they actually make decent money for the Web sites that publish them? According to a new analysis, no.
That's not what the analysis showed. It showed one metric and it's impact, but it didn't explore the overall value of the page views, visits and CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value) of the stories it examined. Let's hope the publishers do a more thorough job and that we, as content creators & marketers, think carefully about how to value the content we create and the traffic we attract.
Rand, thanks for your post about the Perfect Market study on news story revenue. We conducted this study because page views are being used as the sole metric in many decisions and revenue is clearly something that should be considered -- that other metrics should be studied is right, it just wasn't in the scope of this study.
To your point about the value of links, a recent study by CNN on news sharing suggests that ongoing hard news stories are shared at a substantially higher rate than “quirky or funny” news. While this doesn’t measure in bound links directly, it does suggest that there is link building value in harder news.
A study on in-bound links to news stories would be interesting and would add nuance to the idea that celebrity news and trend chasing may not be the best way for news sites to build lasting and sustainable businesses. Tools like Open Site Explorer could useful for figuring that out.
Thanks Truder for the links (and confirming my ideas about this matter).
Thanks for commenting Tim - great to have you here.
I think that much like misinterpretation of our correlation studies or suggestions about the potential value of specific tactics, there's issues with the interpretation and impact of your work. But, just as we don't plan to stop investigating and researching, neither should you give up just because the press oversimplified the story.
Also appreciate the other resources you pointed to - an analysis of the types of content that earns links via OSE is a great suggestion. I could certainly imagine using top pages on major media outlet sites combined with some human categorization to get some interesting takeaways that could serve as a corollary to your work.
A previous study suggested "awesomeness" was better than, well ... you know, the silly stuff. This study measured online article sharing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/science/09tier.html
From the article:
"Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list."
So, at the very least we can safely say that "hard news" is not a waste of time after all, and that people like to share articles that engage their minds.
I consider this to be "good news!"
Hard news is good, but bedraggled Lindsay photos or a crying Paris or OMG what did Charlie do this time is what gets some social forwarding, IMHO.
Hard news to be crazy horrific to get must traction on the web, earthquake in Haiti, Tsunami, the idea of a country having an uprising. Would be nice to see social media tweeting about the dangers of smoking or the like. Off topic again, sorry.
Ciao Rand,
I liked a lot your post, that is really "food for thoughts".
My first thought is a sad confirmation of how Press Journalists still have not understood how really people use the web. Just to think content as a natural bait for ads click through is really an offline way of thinking. Infact, it is not so different than creating tv shows about Gossip, Celebs or simply Junk in order to gain audience and, therefore, sell to an higher price the ads spaces. I know well this "marketing view of content" as I lived with it a long time in past.
My second thought is even more sad, and it is about how superficial generally the tech and web technologies and sciences are examined and explained by the news. I don't blame Perfect Market too (as they simply give an insight to those datas they care for), but the journalists who just consider those datas.
And it is very sad, especially because we grew up with the miths of Journalism as an investigative profession, when - instead - reality shows us how it is a profession mostly done in a plain and fast way so to fill the pages (impressed and/or online).
The right investigation, and I hope the in house SEOs of the newspapers do it, would have been to check out the citations, the tweets, the links the different kind of articles generate. And, maybe, if they would have been using the first touch attribution analytics code, they could have surprising discoveries about the ad conversions too.
And my final reflection: "light" news vs. "thoughtful" ones. As my experience teached me, the first ones can be a real link bait just if they are real scoops: for example (if we want to classify it so and I'm purposely using a top kind of example), the news of the death of Michael Jackson was a great linkbait for the site that first launched the news.
Instead, because of their more niche nature, news (current news or more structurated news specials) about travel, politics (in this case investigative journalism researches), cooking, science, social... tends to have an higher percentile of rtweets and citations. Why? Because their readers are not "Metro" kind of readers and therefore more ready to share the news they find interesting.
It is sad that the older media do not really 'get' how users are interacting on the web. You can see it everyday on the news with anchors saying follow us on twitter or sign up for our facebook page with no reason whatsoever as to WHY someone would want to do that.
Part of it is that some of the anchors don't care, they are to speak clearly and look good. Some reporters do get it. Some kinda get it. I follow Robin Meade and she, or her staff, send out some updating tweets. I think the media is too overwhelmed with being first instead of best.
This, to me, suggests that a thorough content strategy would include both viewbait (in the form of soft news stories), and link/adbait (in the form of harder stories).
Essentially, this is how traditional publishers have been doing business for years; the production of cheap, high-selling novels allows a house to take more risks when it comes to attracting critically acclaimed talent. Popularity and credibility make excellent bedfellows.
I think it worked great as linkbait for Perfect Market.
May be the journalist is simplifying and dropping quality of stories because people want it? Do people like to read simplify stories where they don't need to think about?
And I would still question general knowledge of SEO and online marketing. I suspect that most of people does not have enough knowledge of online marketing. So they might even not know to look at other metrics which would draw clearer picture. Should journalists be interested in business and online metrics when they report about something?
I couldn't have said it better myself. Publications using "soft" stories as bait looking for lifetime readers I feel less than a great idea. I also agree with the fact that main-stream media should be looking at publishing content that will is far more introspective than that. Those would be the publications that would stand out and be of real value therefore granting them the increase in readership or RSS subcribers.
Also as you put it as the we are the creators of content we should also be mindful of what we are creating and expect better from ourselves.
Ive found that big businesses have a tendacy to do some over-strategizing.
Its pretty simple for publishers;
Good content = Good Traffic = Attracts advertisers
Its no shock that a news article about "lindsay lohan flashing her bits" is not going to result in a direct ad click, but becoming an authority in that field might result in the repeated visits that will result in ad engagement.
Sounds like someones discovered Google insights and thinks there an expert.
a great book on the subject is "content rules" by CC Chapman and Ann Handley. An excellent read on how to make great content.
a great book on the subject is "content rules" by CC Chapman and Ann Handley. An excellent read on how to make great content.
a great book on the subject is "content rules" by CC Chapman and Ann Handley. An excellent read on how to make great content.
As said before, I believe that you can't expect all studies to be perfect, as it might not deliever precise insights regarding content topic value, it is insight nevertheless.
And you just can't expect people to not misunderstand you as it's just their nature.
I Agree that Market Study shouldn't have said that the study shows that X is better than Y, but then again did they really say that?
Anyways, another great post that teaches us not take every headline as a solid fact. Thanks
I guess its a matter of balancing between the two. This is why most news websites have a blog section where they write about the softer news whereas the main website delivers hard news. I don't think journalists have the time, effort or will to dig up the metrics and decide what kind of news to deliver. If they have in house SEOs who can help them then that's good but ultimately the focus should be on hard news since thats the primary product of a news website.
You are right, always I see the same thing all stories are as you said "soft" its really need to be address in the comunity to get rid of that kind of situation .
Most of the time people doing the same just click but they are not aware of Internet Marketing .
thanks and Please keep posting such information
interesting remarks Rhand!
however being critical is not always the easy way - nor the most rewarding - and I guess that's usually the issue
Interestingly, I didn't click on any ads on the NYTimes site when I read that story. Huh...
This is an excellent example of what happens when journalists write about technical subjects they don't know. They just end up parroting what some "expert" with an agenda tells them.
This is certainly bad news for the Oatmeal...I guess he'll be shutting down his site soon (insert sarcasm here).
I know a lot of seo, analytics and social media "experts" have remarkably less expertise than they claim. Many who do have the expertise struggle with communicating their ideas and expertise to regular folk - and if asked to write a decent business story for a non-techical, mass market audience would fail miserably. The NYT isn't searchengineland.
Hey Rand, this is only peripherally related but if you're looking for some real substance in your news (and if you're interested in geo-political forecasting and analysis especially), then I suggest you check out Stratfor. If CNN, FOX and all the rest of cable news are the icing on the cake, then Stratfor is the moist yummy center; a whole lot of depth on current events with executive summaries followed by logical analysis, delivered objectively (i.e. without any political bias). They're got some free content if you want to get a taste, but otherwise it's a yearly subscription. Not cheap either, but if you want to know why nation states act the way they do, there's really no better source (that I know of, anyway) then Stratfor. And no, I don't work for them :)
Off topic - but Stratfor looks like an interesting site. Thanks for the heads up.
That's exactly what I was thinking yesterday when I digged on that article, too. Lindsey article will make link bait and make good for site in that way, and then, since site will become stronger, more people will come to serious articles that will get leads. There is a purpose for different kind of articles on one site.
Excellent post, Rand!
At the same time, I share your sentiments that if we can get the press off celebrities' backs for personal issues, the world might be a better place, regardless if some marketing misinformation occurs :-) Maybe karma just kicks in with your ad revenue if you're not spreading bad stuff about celebrities going through hard times.
--Dan