Category: Community

Atlas News and Viafoura – achieving soaring levels of community engagement

Focused on bridging the gap between the intelligence community and the general public through short-form content, Atlas News covers everything from geo-politics to conflict. While Atlas News is a digital news site, Stanford Nix, COO explains that “our community is our business”.

Their vibrant community is unbelievably active and loyal to their brand. “People use our products and consume our content because it’s important. They stay because they enjoy it” says Stanford. Most publishers dream of a community that sees and values everything they do. Atlas News has more than achieved that ideal. They’ve even had customers emailing them informing them of a loophole in subscription walls, and offering to pay back their subscription for the previous 4 months – all because they value the content Atlas News provides!

It is because of these achievements that Atlas News has set its new product introduction standards so high. Stanford noticed that “while our readership was high, we didn’t integrate our audience into our new platforms. I went on a deep dive to find a solution that could provide our customers with a more broad range of product offerings. We don’t see Viafoura as a tool, we see it as a product. A product we could leverage to generate more traffic, time on platform, and revenue. We have arguably one of the most dedicated and active communities in news. Our engagement rates are 8x of industry standard and bringing that social media engagement to our platform was the obvious next step. And Viafoura is the clear king of community engagement.”

For Atlas News, integrating Viafoura’s Conversations, Live Blogs, Community Chat, Trending Articles, and Moderation solutions is helping them reach new levels of engagement. Says Stanford, “It will not only affect our digital experience, it IS the digital experience. Reading articles and being informed is the passion in our community. But community engagement is where we really see our business come to life. Social media style features like comments, follows, upvotes and downvotes, are going to be an integral part of our growth and overall attractiveness to our community.”

Viafoura is also excited to work with Atlas News. Dalia Vainer, Director of Customer Success at Viafoura affirms how “we are looking forward to launching Viafoura core suite with Atlas’ unique younger demographic! We’ll be actively engaging their direct-to-user relationship on their owned and operated- something their audiences are used to with socials, but leading in a brand-safe and 1st party data forward way. What an exciting launch! “

Engagement strategy benchmarks for digital content producers

There is a direct correlation between engagement and revenue – as a user becomes increasingly engaged in your content, they yield gradually more revenue to your business:

  • More page views for advertising revenue
  • More likely to create a free account, meaning you can charge more for targeted ad spots
  • Higher propensity to subscribe in the future
  • Potential to become a brand advocate who recommends you to others

Engagement is therefore essential for any publisher to track and seek to develop throughout the user journey, moving users from Volatiles (only visiting your site an average of once per month) to Fans (who visit 19+ times a month) and later subscribers.

Take inspiration from some of the most successful publishers in the business on how they engage audiences:

The Independent blocks users with a registration wall

Le Monde encourages recirculation with recommended content

The BBC News app sends push notifications

Channel 4 on demand allows registered users to save content for later

Financial Times lets users follow topics

L’Oreal’s brand publication Makeup.com includes quizzes to increase engagement and collect data

Le Drench asks users to vote in articles that are laid out as a debate

Men’s Journal asking questions to users on the home page

South China Morning Post social sharing options are placed at the side of content

The Guardian games app

The Independent’s Instagram-style video slides within articles to increase recirculation

The Sydney Morning Herald allows commenting for registered users

The Washington Post ‘The 7’ habit-forming newsletter sent at the same time every day

Best practices for increasing engagement:

  • Form habits through regularity: e.g. newsletters sent at the same time every day to either form a new habit or fit into an existing one (such as the commute to work or a morning coffee)
  • Balance frustration with engagement to increase the value of your users. Engagement is great, but you also need to monetize your content!
  • Employ strategies that encourage recirculation so that users remain on your site
  • Offer as much personalization as possible (such as for newsletters , push notifications, ect) to make sure users are only getting content that interests and engages them rather than frustrates
  • Provide value in exchange for conversion steps – for instance, registered users could be offered additional UX features, exclusive content, a lighter ad experience, etc
  • Interactive content is your new best friend! Engaging users with games, quizzes or personality tests will help to keep them on page for longer and coming more frequently, especially if there’s something to be gained from it (such as a discount, especially if you’re a brand publisher)

This article was originally published by The Audiencers. The Audiencers is a B2B publication by Poool, The Membership and Subscription Suite, a simple, all-in-one platform for digital content producers to convert, manage and retain their members and subscribers. Find out more on poool.tech or book a free demo with their team.

From community to reader revenue: lessons to learn from The Independent and Reach PLC

In its most simplest form, there are 2 steps to convert audiences into revenue:

  1. Engagement – unlocking the revenue potential of your audience
  2. Conversion – activating this potential to gradually increase revenue

The question then turns to exactly how this can be achieved.

For Mark Zohar, President and CEO at Viafoura, one of the most effective strategies involves building a community of increasingly more engaged and loyal users, whilst continuously moving them through a funnel of value exchanges and direct interactions to increase revenue.

Why should publishers build a community?

When audiences aren’t on your site, they’re spending a great deal of time on social media, growing accustomed to certain experiences and features that keep them coming back for more. In particular, these users feel part of a community. They can…

  • Interact with content
  • Comment
  • See other user’s opinions and contributions
  • Join events
  • Like and share content
  • Follow topics and authors that match their interests

These experiences have become user expectations, making traditional digital publisher sites seem passive with very little direct interaction.

As Mark puts it, we’re social beings who want to react and have human experiences – and it’s this that makes community so powerful.

“Publishers need to build a bridge between user expectations and experiences on publisher’s sites.” 

Another important reason why publishers should build a community is because content is a commodity – it’s easy to find any content at any time, especially for big news stories.

Community, on the other hand, is not a commodity. It’s an asset. Something that feeds into your brand value, that a user will come back for and that will make you different from other publishers producing similar content.

How engaging your community will drive value

All publishers with a reader revenue strategy aim to register or subscribe their audience. The problem, however, is when they try to go from 0 to 100 – from unengaged to a loyal subscriber.

Mark compares it to dating – you wouldn’t immediately ask someone to marry you (unless maybe if you’re on ‘Married at first sight’!), you’d ask them to dinner first.

Community helps to provide these intermediary steps, building engagement before trying to get value from your audience.

I.e. Community-led conversion.

For Reach PLC, this involves a 4-step model: Discover, Engage, Connect & Commit.

The key here, according to Mark, is to ungate the community but lock the content, reserving it for registered members or subscribers only. Readers will see the comments and feedback, building enough intrigue and interest to make them want to unlock the article.

Their ‘In Your Area’ postcode services & community, for instance, have led to 3 million registered users and a 35% increase in page-views per visitor since 2019.

On Reach’s “Devon Live” brand, commenting is reserved for registered users only, with messaging framing the action as a conversation that a reader can either be excluded or included in (“join”).

I’d add here that it’s also essential to highlight that registration is free. Although it benefits both you and the reader, it won’t cost them a penny and can be a brilliant way to monetize the large portion of your audience who may never pay to subscribe.

The Independent is another publisher who has made the most of community to register users, increasing engagement and collecting first-party data. To achieve this, they’ve put the focus on their audience, understanding and engaging with them in various forms across the site:

  • Q&A sessions with online experts covering a range of topics
  • Connecting journalists with their readers
  • Personalization features, such as the ability to follow topics, comment on articles and automated personalization based on data

Many of these community experiences are reserved for registered members who have proven to be 11x more engaged than anonymous users. 

And the funnel doesn’t stop there. Even after creating an account, registered users may still be blocked when trying to access premium features, such as bookmarking content, which are reserved for paying subscribers.

These conversion steps gradually move users through a funnel, collecting first-party data, increasing engagement and, importantly, revenue.

Subscribers have proven to be 62x more engaged than anonymous visitors

Best practices for building & gaining value from community

1) Reward your best contributors for their loyalty and participation

“Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing one, whilst increasing customer retention by just 5% can increase profits from 25-95%”.

Retention should therefore be a priority, and rewarding highly engaged community members can play a valuable role in ensuring these users keep coming back.

  • Exclusive access for highly engaged users
  • Social proof – provide them with a subscriber badge or ‘super engaged user’ tag by their name (think of Twitter’s blue tick system)
  • Referral bonus/reward for inviting a new user to join the community
  • Feature their comments somewhere publicly, giving them a sense of fame
  • Reply to these users, establishing a more direct relationship with your publication

2) Highlight the best of your community

The benefits of this are two fold:

Firstly, you forefront the best comments to entice non-members to unlock content and comment so as to not miss out on this conversation. Any comments that add insight but also open up the discussion are particularly valuable here.

Secondly, you give the writers of these featured comments a sense of fame and inclusion as they’re placed directly below the article, encouraging them to comment more frequently.

3) Think bigger than just comments

As Mark put it, you can’t just slap on a comment section and hope for the best. You have to develop a whole community experience from the moment a user lands on your site and do so through a variety of formats.

Some of the most successful community-building techniques involve direct interaction between the newsroom and your audience. This could be as simple as journalists leaving an open ended question to users once a week, but it’s a small investment that your newsroom has to make to develop a strong, loyal community that brings business value.

4) Once you’ve collected data, put it to use

Identifying interests, propensities, etc is great, but this needs to circle back to improve the experience offered to users. Even personalizing a user’s home screen or content recommendations can have a big impact on engagement and revenue.

5) Moderation is crucial

Investing in a solution, whether AI or human, is the only way to ensure that your community is moderated enough to keep control whilst also allowing for free reign.

Mark recommends creating community guidelines and finding a solution that allows you to ban someone entirely, ghost ban someone (the user doesn’t know they’re banned – they can still comment, but no one else will see it) or even give some community members moderation status, gaining value from these users and increasing their loyalty as they feel more involved in the community.

Thank you to Mark Zohar, President and CEO at Viafoura, for speaking to me about this topic!

This article was originally published by The Audiencers. The Audiencers is a B2B publication by Poool, The Membership and Subscription Suite, a simple, all-in-one platform for digital content producers to convert, manage and retain their members and subscribers. Find out more on poool.tech or book a free demo with their team.

From anonymous to first-party: How to turn visitors into registered users and subscribers

It’s an age-old problem for publishers. How do you get casual readers to become loyal subscribers? Let’s first consider how publications strayed from reader engagement to understand the answer to this question. Fastener interviewed Mark Zohar at Viafoura to learn more about the history of audience engagement in digital publishing.

The Outsourcing Stop-gap

Before the internet, the number of publications remained constrained by labor and paper costs, forcing subscriptions on a local level and limiting competition. Yahoo opened the web in 1995, and in 2004, Web 2.0, followed by smartphones in 2007, delivered instant gratification, community and interactivity online. Shortly thereafter, web publications began to outsource their customer service, feedback and commenting abilities, allowing third parties to determine their fate, popularity and ultimately their content through clicks, likes, reviews, tweets and TikToks.

Publishers began validating vanity interactions rather than synergy with their readers. At the time, this was logical. Bots, spam and guerilla postings by malcontents required constant monitoring. Customer Management Systems (CMS) were expensive and required teams of marketing and tech experts to administer. Social media was free (sort of — publishers paid by relinquishing control, privacy and data) and increasingly the preferred method of communication between the business world and its customers. The time and cost of managing engagement, “who needs it!” proffered conventional wisdom.

Opportunity Cost

The cost of relying on third parties — the loss of business and customer intelligence, control and interaction — became apparent as time passed. Third parties, including social media, understood more about an organization’s customers than they did. After all, these outside entities communicated with their customers, collected data, directed them, entertained, and serviced them. These entities engaged and profited from the publisher’s work.

Consider the following facts:

  • Engaged visitors stay longer, go deeper and generate 4x more advertising opportunities.
  • They are 2x more likely to click on an ad.
  • Viafoura’s engaged users are 51x more likely to register.
  • And registered visitors are 45x more likely to subscribe than casual visitors to your digital properties.

Publishers that engage their readers monetize their properties. Engaging digitally means communication, and communication begins with taking power back to parlay and maintaining control of the wealth of first-party data each exchange produces.

Because publishers outsourced engagement, the vast majority of their visitors remained anonymous, with only a minute percentage registering or subscribing. Publishers continued living in the eighties but are trying to do business in the twenty-twenties, relying on third-party research to understand their readers.

How anonymous users become subscribers

Leading readers through the subscriber journey is relatively painless with the right tools. The Viafoura Digital Experience Platform (DXP) provides the interactivity and immediacy of social media while maintaining control on the publisher’s property of the data, opportunities and experience.

Viafoura’s DXP anonymous-to-subscriber strategy involves four levels: Engagement Suite, Personalization, Moderation, and Data.

Engagement suite

Creating loyal subscribers from anonymous readers begins with on-site engagement on publishers’ owned and operated digital properties. Readers who feel listened to return more often and dive deeper into your publication. Viafoura deploys various solutions to make readers feel at home, including social sharing, chat, Q&As and conversations. And then there is the ultimate VIP ticket, the live blogging platform coupled with Viafoura’s Conversations. Together or solo, each creates an immersive experience between a publication and its reader community, resulting in an average 600 percent lift in subscriptions.

Personalization

Nobody wants to be an unknown number when engaging with a publication. Therefore, personalization is the next step in making anonymous readers cherished subscribers. Personalization includes capturing and using more than a person’s name. It means having options that craft an experience unique to each reader, including alerts, notifications, follow options, recommendations, and curated feeds. Readers feel like family when content is personalized to their needs, likes and wants. It is a mesmerizing experience that keeps them coming back. Viafoura’s DPX puts personalization under the publisher’s control.

Moderation

Without comment moderation, the trolls take over, and suddenly a pleasant interaction becomes a toxic mix of vitriol, hurting the publication and the user experience. On average, a publisher will lose 80 percent of its anonymous readers due to a hostile environment. However, well-moderated engagement increases registrations and subscriptions by an average of 400 percent within six months. Viafoura’s DXP uses multiple strategies to streamline moderation and reduce the number of people needed to keep it going by customizing parameters to each publication’s policies across all properties and social media. Artificial intelligence combined with human expertise and easy-to-read dashboards take on the trolls and temper the tantrums to ensure engagement on its client’s publications remains civil, pleasurable and informative.

Data

Data is worth more than gold in the digital world. It determines content, direction, strategy, partners, advertising, marketing, corporate expenditures, budgets, pricing, new products and investments—data is behind every informed decision. Yet many publishers give away their primary data by outsourcing engagement. Controlling all aspects of the publishing ecosystem delivers unprecedented intelligence that allows a publication to improve its content, better service its readers and strategically plan for the future. Viafoura’s DXP delivers far more than the 83 average metrics. Its digital engagement platform provides over 200 data points, vital information that elevates customer experience, value, and loyalty, which translates to subscribers.

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Viafoura’s unique approach boosts on-site engagement, increasing user registrations and subscriptions. Additionally, it produces internet gold, the ultra-valuable first-party data that creates unique personas and insights exclusive to the publication. Detailed information permits publishers to fine-tune their content, increasing its value to their readers while simultaneously lifting advertising revenues and engagement. Happy readers become loyal readers. Loyal readers become subscribers—leading us back to the original question. How do digital publishers turn visitors into registered users and subscribers while improving their publications? They invest in engagement tools, and Viafoura’s DXP is the leader.

Loyalty Plays: The Next Era Of Retention

There’s an old saying in marketing that “it costs more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one.” Some studies have shown it can cost up to five times more to focus solely on customer acquisition at the disservice of customer retention.

Publishers who focus solely on registration and pumping out as much content as possible often neglect relationships with existing readers. By taking stock of current relationships and finding new ways to reward subscribed readers for brand loyalty, publishers are far more likely to improve customer retention rates.

Don’t devalue retention: it’s more profitable than you know

There’s money to be made in retention, even with a slight move of the needle in the right direction. According to a Harvard Business School study, improving customer retention rates by as little as 5% can improve profitability by 25%. In some cases, profits can rise up to 95%.

Those findings are similar to research conducted by Gartner, which determined that 80% of business profits come from 20% of existing customers. Additionally, the success rate of converting an existing reader into a paying subscriber ranges between a 60% to 70% success rate. Conversely, the success rate of converting a new reader into a subscriber ranges between 5% and 20%.

The bottom line is that there’s plenty of value to be found in reader retention. Publishers just need the right approach and the right resources to engage with existing readers to convert them into brand loyal subscribers.

Personalization fosters loyalty and retention

Communicating with your existing readers using personalized content experiences is the best way to earn reader loyalty. What and how you communicate with your readers makes all the difference between retaining their business and losing their interest.

For example, if you were to publish generic content week after week, it’s hard for readers to see the value in the experience. Instead, the audience sentiment will be that you’re just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. The content loses all of your brand’s personality that first resonated with readers, increasing the likelihood that they churn and never return to your site.

On the other hand, personalized content that appeals to specific reader interests is far more engaging to your audience. By demonstrating that your creative team understands their readers, and chooses to publish content that adds greater value to their experience with your website, you have a winning formula to improve retention rates and, hopefully, subscription rates.

Collect first-party data to gain those audience insights

One of the best ways to boost audience engagement and increase the value that readers experience from your publication is to encourage their engagement with your community. Encourage your authors to add the first comment to freshly produced content in an effort to kickstart a conversation with your readers. Encourage your audience to post their thoughts and use a commenting moderation tool to analyze the sentiment shared by your readers.

As more comments are submitted, you automatically build a wealth of first-party data that you can leverage to gain more insight into your reader tastes and preferences. You can pick up on things like what themes within the content people react towards, and you can measure the preference for one type of author over another.

Once you collect enough first-party data to really understand your audience, you can revamp your content strategy into a data-driven initiative. Focus the subject matter of your content around the themes, topics, and interests that your data informs you is what matters most to your readers. Show your avid community that you listen to their responses by producing more of the content they’ve indicated is what they want. This is how you build a loyal following that is likely to provide customer lifetime value for years to come.

Incentivize readers to act with special recognitions

To encourage further debate around your content, you can assign badges to comments that generate responses from other readers. Show your most valuable readers and/or subscribers that you recognize their contributions to the discussion, proving to them that they’re considered VIPs among your reading audience. Earn that reader loyalty and reap the fruits of those labors!

Community-Focused Tools And Tactics To Hit KPI and ROI Goals

This was originally posted on INMA.

If your current Digital Experience Platform(DXP) isn’t serving your community, or rather, is not enabling your organization to serve, sustain, and expand your community, then it’s not worth your money. 

Furthermore, if you are fortunate enough to be host to a community, particularly one that enjoys engaging with and discovering the realm of their interests that you’ve created, you’re sitting on a gold mine of growth potential and first party data. 

It’s no secret that an active, non-toxic community is a powerful driver of audience growth, but in order to make the most of community driven conversion opportunities there are some preparatory measures that can be taken. 

Community Foundation

Before we begin honing in on the inner-workings of your community, take stock of the tools and strategies you currently have in place and assess whether or not they are providing a worthwhile ROI. Some questions to ask as you set about this task are:

Infrastructure and Discoverability

Does your site’s architecture drive visitors intuitively to where the community is at its best, or are there a number of barriers in their way? 

Consider where on their journey users are confronted with a sign-up form of some sort. Then, evaluate if there’s greater potential for conversion by giving them a bit of free reign to see the value you have to offer elsewhere. Giving unregistered users enough access to see but not join on-site discussions or special events like a live Ask-Me-Anything community chat could be just the kind of content that is worth their time and, subsequently, their registered first-party data. 

Does your current comment interface and strategy help or hinder engagement?

Providing users with the means to easily jump into the comments section and join discussions is an effective way to improve engagement. Recently, Viafoura partnered up with News-Press & Gazette Co. (NPG) to help them over-haul their prior approach to comment sections that relied on manual approval, resulting in endless queues of user contributions stuck in limbo. After integrating Viafoura’s Automated Moderation onto their platform, NPG saw a drastic improvement in their overall engagement as well as the complete reactivation of previously stagnant communities across a number of their sites.

Community Health

Have you and your teams taken measures to ensure that when new visitors arrive they’re greeted by a wholesome and inviting community? 

If some of the first things visitors see are comments and discussions rife with vitriol and toxicity, they won’t stay long – if at all. In order to keep the peace and foster a welcoming space for newcomers, it’s imperative that you provide clear and concise community guidelines. These guidelines will assist in the preservation of your community’s well being by giving its members and your moderation teams consistent parameters to follow while reinforcing your brand values and interests while doing so. 

In order to scale down some of the more taxing and meticulous moderation tasks (profanity, hate speech etc.), adopting an Intelligent Moderation Engine is a turn-key solution for immediate deflection of toxicity. 

Create a Playground of Engagement

Plainly: creating an engaging and discoverable user experience (UX) will invigorate your audience. As publishers, there is an obvious responsibility to provide your readers with high-quality content that stands out in the vast and highly saturated digital media landscape. More specifically, as digital publishers, the journey that users go on as they experience your site and its content is just as important.

A digital media platform that gives its users a range of capabilities to engage – be it through exploration, discovery, or community – is guaranteed a far higher chance of earning consistent growth in registrations, longer time spent on-site, and an increasingly concise understanding of their audience’s behaviour and interests. All of which can contribute to an improvement in ad-revenue by providing you with the data necessary to prove the worth of your premium ad space to potential partners.

Topic and Author Follows

Topic and Author following capabilities are highly engaging points of conversion and excellent data collection avenues. By tracking what content and which authors are being followed via built in analytics, editorial and content strategies can be adjusted to meet the evident interests being shown in the declarative data that comes from these community specific actions.

In terms of engagement, users who follow particular authors or topics also have a far higher propensity for return visits because of the notifications they’ll receive when more content tied to what they follow is published.

Conclusion

In this digital age where an extensive and engaging digital experience platform is paramount to the success and longevity of digital media organizations, taking the time to create rewarding and enjoyable experiences for your audience communities is the least we can do. With the right tools and approach to a community focused growth strategy, publishers will make short work of achieving their ROIs and surpassing previous KPI goals.

Why Comment Moderation Vendors Need to go Above and Beyond to Protect Their Partners

Media companies, like all brands, are looking to build recognition and trust by publishing user-generated content. However, publishing this content isn’t risk-free: organizations need to ensure that users aren’t publishing offensive or threatening posts on their websites or apps. This is where content moderation comes into the picture.

In today’s modern environment, organizations are doing everything possible to ensure that civility exists on their digital properties while, at the same time, promoting free speech and opinionated conversations. Many of them have implemented moderation solutions that use live moderators or run automated algorithms to solve this challenge.

The general population has also become aware of moderation — especially what it does and why it’s being used. So what happens when your moderation partner becomes more than another ordinary technology vendor?

Recently, a Viafoura customer and one of the largest publishers in the UK discovered why the Viafoura moderation team is so much more than a partner.

The publisher uses both the AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Live Moderation solutions from Viafoura. As the AI solution learns and enforces the community guidelines set forth by the publisher, 85% to 90% of all comments are easily moderated by its AI engine. The remaining “questionable comments” are sent to a live moderator for a judgment call.

Earlier this year, one of those comments was sent to a live moderator at Viafoura. A user made a threat to a nursery in the commenting section, which of course was flagged and sent to the moderation queue.

Instead of just blocking the comment and banning the user, Viafoura’s moderation employee contacted the publisher’s team to explain the situation. The employees at the large publishing company immediately addressed the situation with local law enforcement.

In under half an hour of the comment being posted, the police took action.

Thanks to the quick thinking of Viafoura and the publisher’s employees, who went the extra mile, a potentially terrible situation was entirely avoided.

“Moderation is much more than a judgment call of ensuring user-generated content upholds platform-specific guidelines and rules to establish the suitability of the content for publishing,” says Leigh Adams, director of moderation services at Viafoura. “Yes, we are all about maintaining our customers’ standards, but it’s also about recognizing when a comment has to be escalated. We pride ourselves on having staff that know what to do when — and go the extra mile to reach out to our customers — because we have the relationship to do that easily.”

Overcoming News Avoidance And Winning Back Your Audience

If nothing else, one positive element that emerged from the pandemic is a renewed focus on mental health and wellness. From one week to the next, people worldwide became shut-ins whether they wanted to or not. They were forced to sit at home and, after burning through all that Netflix had to offer, think. Think, reflect, and become aware of their mental health in ways that had perhaps been easier to avoid in the before times. 

With this time for reflection, it’s no wonder people began to notice the correlation between their moods and mental health and the non-stop emotional rollercoaster of the news cycle throughout the pandemic. In one sitting viewers would be subject to an inspiring video of Italians singing from their balconies in quarantine, followed by horrifying stories of people trapped in their homes with deceased loved ones – all while a chiron at the bottom of the screen provided an ever-updating death counter. 

While the news cycle is not known for being a constant source of uplifting content, the pandemic brought to light the impact that bad news has on our mental well being. It’s no wonder that new audience behaviors emerged. Ones that, to the detriment of publishers everywhere, would have us sooner look away and avoid the news than tune in to have our days ruined by yet another article about the latest existential threat. 

Mental health effect on news avoidance trends

News avoidance: the active or intentional resistance or rejection of news. 

Though still in the early days of this new behaviour, studies have indicated that people the world over have become more selective of the content they consume. It is a means of mitigating the negative feelings that come hand in hand with a news cycle that seems to skew ever more negative, concerning, and depressing.

In the early days of the pandemic, according to data compiled by Nielsen, publishers tracked a 60% increase in news content consumption, globally. What were the headlines during that period? Stories related to the pandemic, as well as political crises occurring around the world, with more than a few notable mentions belonging to the United States.

As time went on and the headlines became ever more tragic, an overwhelming sense of burnout amongst audiences was being fueled by the news. In an annual Reuters survey of over 90,000 participants in 46 different markets, it was found that 43% of people said the non-stop barrage of COVID-19 or political news triggered their decisions to embrace selective news avoidance. Additionally, 36% of those same respondents said their moods were negatively affected by all the predominantly depressing nature of the news cycle.

Publishers have since then have found themselves in an impossible position: report honestly on the grim nature of our world’s current events and suffer decreased views, report sensationally and lose credibility, or report on benign topics like celebrity divorces and scandals to keep people entertained but uninformed?

Negativity crushes trust, increasing news avoidance

Not only a tricky situation for editorial and content teams, news avoidance has also made it difficult to build communities of passionate and engaged followers. It’s even more difficult when the news itself is deemed untrustworthy by misguided or misinformed consumers. The United States, in particular, has to grip with this growing trend. Only one quarter of US respondents say they trust their nation’s news media.

Audiences will always have thoughts and opinions, particularly when it comes to larger than life concepts like the spread of a pandemic or an insurrection to overthrow democracy. It’s natural to want to share those thoughts and open up a discussion about those ideas, something that the comment section of an article is quite literally made for.

However, nearly one out of five respondents to the Reuters study said they skew towards news avoidance because sharing their opinions lead to arguments they’d rather avoid. This goes right to the heart of the challenge that publishers face as they attempt to come up with solutions for their waning engagement and subscription rates. If people don’t feel comfortable expressing their viewpoints, not only will they avoid engaging in open discourse around enticing subject matter, it’s likely that they will avoid the content altogether.

How to overcome news avoidance and win over audiences

So what can publishers do to overcome news avoidance and build thriving communities of passionate readers? Answer: an audience-first, data informed growth strategy.

By putting the interests of your audience first, creating content that aligns with your orgnizations values, and the goals of your editorial and publishing teams – you’re in good shape to start diminishing the risk of news avoidance. If you’re able to position yourself as a publisher who delivers high-quality content and makes space for community and healthy discourse, you’re on track to winning back your audience and gaining access to valuable first-party data that will further inform your efforts.

Behavioural insights are essential in the current digital publishing landscape. That data can be difficult to acquire without an analytics team, but turn-key solutions do exist.

Shadow banning against community violators

Platforms built by moderators to help other moderators maintain a positive community are available to you and your teams.

One valuable tool for community moderation is time-based shadow banning. These “timeouts” can be handed out to people who frequently disobey community guidelines and spread toxicity. 

Labeling comments can help reinforce those guidelines further, highlighting ones that are aligned with guidelines, ones that are veering off topic with more random postings, and even flagged as outright attacks on authors or other community members. Through careful and considerate moderation you’ll be better able to promote cooperative and respectful dialogue among readers. By making the space for discussion safer, you’ve created an inviting opportunity to potential users who may have been avoiding your content as a means of dodging unwanted conflict and toxicity.

IP lookups to restrict or block suspected trolls

Publishers, obviously, need to grow their audiences to stay afloat. A healthy, sizeable viewership is essential to revenue, data informed learning opportunities, and not to mention extremely appealing to advertisers and affiliates eager to spend money to connect with those readers.

Unfortunately, if trolls or extremists harass other community members to the point of pushing them towards news avoidance, the quality of the viewership is greatly diminished. Quantity is not better than quality, even when views and shares are important metrics to help boost subscriptions.

Instead, you can use platforms with built-in IP address lookup capabilities to find these bad actors and moderate their posts so they can no longer disrupt the rest of the community. This will also help you avoid inadvertently violating publishing guidelines of your affiliates and risk losing vital business, which was a hard lesson learned by the people of Parler following January 6.

Moderate conversations, live events, community chats, and reviews

Finally, use your moderation console to encourage healthy dialogue across all digital streams affiliated with your publication. This can include conversations in the comments section of an article to interactions among live events and community chats. You can even influence the tone of ratings and reviews about your publication to stop misleading negativity from spreading.

The console plugs directly into each of these forums, allowing your entire editorial team to work out of the same space and enforce consistent guidelines across each outlet. Not only will this increase the efficiency and productivity of your team, but you’ll set a standard for your audience about what kind of community they can expect from your publication. This is how you set the stage to build trust and authenticity, two absolutely necessary traits to grow your audience.

While the world is ever-changing and readers adjust the way they consume content, publishers need to be mindful of how to create spaces that can be informative, safe and encouraging for their readers.

What Traditional Media Companies Can Learn From Social Media Companies?

Over the past decade plus, we’ve seen social media evolve from a trend that kept people connected to arguably the most important and influential medium in modern society. More than just a way to share photos with friends, social media has grown into a space to share information, exchange ideas, and discover new communities. As we’ve seen from countless newspapers who failed to adapt to creating online content, traditional media companies can still learn a lot from social media organizations.

How social media changed consumption

Social media has changed not only the way we interact with each other, but also the way that content is consumed. For better or worse, many users want quick digestible content that they have the option of learning more through either a link to more longform content or the opportunity to react and discuss with other community members. That said, we’re now seeing a growth of social media intelligence, where most users are aware of lazy tactics such as clickbait or misleading headlines, and will have negative emotions towards any organization attempting to generate attention this way.

A traditional media company may look at a social media organization and see that audiences want quick, digestible content and find frustration in the fact that users aren’t sharing their content no matter how digestible it may be. However, these organizations are missing one key factor that social media companies thrive on.

The most successful social media companies thrive because they are able to target users with not just any digestible content, but content that matches their specific interests. By finding out what it is that each user wants to read, enjoys seeing, and is open to discussing, social media organizations can curate each user’s individual feed to provide an onslaught of content designed specifically for them. While this level of personalization can come across as exceedingly intimidating for a small startup that doesn’t have the resources that larger social media brands do, the lesson comes down to one simple point.

Know your audience

By leveraging data from their community to create personalized news feeds, advertising and programming as well as building a group of like-minded individuals who have an interest in discussing and expanding on the shared content, traditional media companies can provide some of the curated content that users love to experience from their favourite social media platforms.

Personalization can turn into a habit forming retention strategy

Through creating a personalized landing page, organizations are able to build habit forming behavior for their users. Many of the most successful social media companies even take it a step further and implement some sort of notification tool such as the bell icon found on both YouTube and Twitter that will immediately alert those who opt-in of any new content through a push notification. It works as not only an effective retention strategy that keeps users coming back for more with daily frequency, but also helps to keep those same users informed on the most recent conversations so that they can contribute to discussions and assist in growing the community.

Typically, people enjoy some sort of routine and familiarity which is why name recognition, brand loyalty and ease of use are such important factors to how people choose to consume online content. What social media companies thrive at is forming habits that in turn help create this brand loyalty. If someone is checking a specific Twitter account for news every day, then they’re more likely to have a positive association with that person and any other content that they may create.

In conclusion

While quality of a product is always the most important thing, social media is teaching all of us that quantity carries far more weight than traditional media companies originally thought. The days of quarterly, monthly, or even weekly papers are a relic of the past, as users now want new content on demand every time they glance at a publication. By providing something new every day, even if it’s just a short blurb or discussion, organizations can give their users a reason to keep coming back and build that positive association and loyalty that all media companies strive for.

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