Category: Community

Week of Oct. 5th-11th: Your Media News Update

During the course of the last week, the media and publishing industry has been talking about some very important and thought-provoking issues:

  • Publishers are scrambling to expand their revenue channels while navigating through the challenges presented by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 
  • Mergers and acquisitions are all the rage as publishers attempt to expand their content offerings and appeal to niche audiences
  • Valuations of privately-owned publishers are skyrocketing but at the expense of employees

To learn more and stay up to date with the latest and greatest newsmakers of the past week, keep reading about the topics below.

Publishers Scramble for Revenue-Generating Alternatives Post-GDPR

For many publishers, the ever-evolving legalities surrounding the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and loss of third-party cookies on Safari and Firefox browsers represents an inconvenient, potential threat to programmatic ad revenue.  

To combat the restrictions, publishers are trying to figure out ways to monetize their first-party data by creating audience identifiers that help clients target the right people at scale. With this approach, publishers won’t need to rely on third-party cookies.

In some cases, this has led to more granular targeting on their own digital properties around audience intents, behaviors, sentiments and interests. For others, this involves selling first-party data, which will be used for targeting audiences outside of their own properties. 

News Corp is one of the publishers actively pursuing beyond-the-cookie strategies that prioritize identifying audiences with first-party rather than third-party cookies. The organization issues a news ID for individual readers so they can be identified without the use of third-party cookies. To date, the media group has created 590 million global anonymized user IDs. 

Being able to track each known user means that companies can identify the behaviors and appetites within their communities, providing valuable insights around readers’ habits and preferences. 

Others are also pushing hard to convert anonymous users into known users based on first-party data. Insider spent the last year developing hundreds of millions of reader IDs, mapping first-party data that isn’t personally identifiable but provides in-depth insights into reader behaviors, interests and intents. As a result, the company is able to create effective targeting segments for marketers.

Sports media companies are also only beginning to realize now that fan engagement data is key to building audience loyalty and revenue. 

The Financial Times, on the other hand, is focusing on putting efforts towards capitalizing on private deals — specifically programmatic-guaranteed deals. 

Meanwhile, The Washington Post has created a first-party data ad targeting tool that offers detailed contextual targeting capabilities along with user-intent predictions for marketers. The publisher aims to provide targeting options for advertising clients who want to wean themselves away from third-party cookies.

Digital Publishers Are Expanding Their Audiences by Focusing on Niche Interests

In pursuit of audience expansion, digital publishers are buying up smaller, niche publishing companies and are launching new verticals focused on those specific interest areas. 

A growing trend among publishers, the industry as a whole is looking to achieve greater leverage against ad giants Google and Facebook. Three recent announcements are clear proof points that the focus on niche content is how publishers are trying to distinguish themselves within the market:

  • IAC’s Dotdash — a media organization that owns 10 publishers — just purchased Liquor.com, its fourth acquisition this year of niche vertical content.
  • Vice Media’s male-dominated content will now be more inclusive with a deal to acquire Refinery29, a popular publisher with younger female audiences interested in their lifestyle and entertainment verticals. 
  • Bustle Media Group (BMG), a female-focused digital media company, is launching a tech-focused news site called Input in November, bringing BMG’s total site count to eight. Over the past year, BMG also acquired science-focused site Inverse, culture-focused The Outline, and pop-culture-focused Nylon in a bid to attract more diverse audiences. 

Niche outlets are able to help publishers not only expand their audience reach but also their ability to target ads based on interests. This is the main advantage tech giants already have, which easily persuades marketers to sacrifice their precious ad dollars. 

By mimicking this core benefit — interest-based ad targeting on their own properties — publishers can increase their share of the pie. For example, Dotdash is bundling its assets into four groups, including “health and wellness,” “finance” and “food, beverage and home” to make it easier to pitch to certain brand categories by interest area.

Digital Publishing All-Stock Deals Are the New Normal

Investors are no longer interested in funding media companies that are not growing quickly. As a result, the growing trend is making all-stock deals as the last and best option for publishers and their investors. 

While mergers and acquisitions have dominated media headlines this year, some of the biggest have been all or mostly stock-based deals, including the three most recent ones:

Stock deal valuations are essentially what someone else values the stock to be worth. And the only way to know this is to either go public or to sell the company to someone else. It’s up to the seller and the buyer to make up and agree upon the value. The stock isn’t traded on a public exchange, so while the relative values are meaningful, the overall value is virtually meaningless.

Another big issue is that all-stock acquisitions often mean that whatever common stock employees held is now worth much less. That can make it harder to keep the talent they have, as well as recruit new talent.

Week of Sept. 28th-Oct. 4th: Your Media News Update

Over the last few days, industry experts have been buzzing about some interesting media news topics:

  • Registration walls and opinion editorials are enabling publishers to drive higher traffic and capture more data
  • As a way to get around ad-blocking, companies are shifting their focus towards creating higher-quality content that’s supported by ads on their own platforms
  • Publishers are developing creative strategies to continue reaching and engaging with the coveted millennial audience

The list goes on. To stay up to date with the latest and greatest news hits of the past week, take a peek at the trending topics below.

Refocusing on Subscription Revenue Brings Publishers Back to Basics

Subscriptions have become the talk of the media and publishing industry as a more sustainable source of revenue versus digital ad revenue. With market and political conditions awry due to the escalating trade war, many business publishers are seeing a natural increase in subscriptions as readers seek to stay up to date on stock market activities.

However, many organizations are still struggling with increasing their subscription base. Looking deeper into the challenge, the issue may lie in the misalignment of organizational goals and resource allocation. 

According to FIPP’s 2019 Global Digital Subscription Snapshot Report, an overwhelming 75% of publishing execs say they currently spend less than a quarter of resources on subscription efforts.  

However, that’s all changing as more and more media and publishers undergo organizational restructuring. Many publishers are revealing their plans to go back to and enhance their registration walls, which have the potential to drive subscriber conversion rates 10x higher for known users. 

Publishers are also using their first-party data to learn about the types of content readers are willing to provide personal information for, and correlate that back to what they’re willing to pay for to read. The New York Times, Hearst Newspapers and GateHouse Media are just a few examples of those who have started using or updating their registration walls over the past few months. 

Opinion journalism is also coming back in vogue, which has proven to be a lead traffic driver to publisher content. 

In order to achieve revenue targets, shifting to a digital subscription revenue model has become key for media organizations. Publishers are also paying more attention to gathering metrics on how users are interacting with one another around content on their own platforms. With this data, they’re able to fine-tune editorial and subscription strategies around audience behavior. 

Content is Still King and Key to an Optimal Consumer Experience

Several subtle but significant shifts were noted this week in discussions about the future of the news media among industry leaders who gathered for the International News Media Associations’ (INMA) Reader Revenue Symposium. The event focused on how to address a broader mix of income streams than just charging readers for access to content.

Publishers are still all about content, but now in the context of services, experiences and relationships rather than simply selling subscriptions and products. Many recognize that there will be major consumer demand for free services as well as experiences with no or fewer ads. The industry is going to start seeing publishers offering free streaming and accessible content that is ad-supported.

Starting now, publishers will try to diversify the way that they not only reach an audience but how they follow through in monetizing it.

Publishers Get Creative in Finding New Ways to Reach and Engage Millennial Audiences

As the majority of traditional news consumers belong to an aging demographic, publishers know they need to find new ways to reach the younger generations. And that’s only the first step. Once they’ve been reached, the biggest challenge is actually following through in delivering engaging content that will appeal to them and keep them coming back for more. But what are the habits of young people when it comes to news consumption?

The role of news for Gen Z and Gen Y is tricky business because research shows it needs to be highly personal rather than characterized by broad generalizations. According to a new report from Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, adults aged 18-35 view the news from the perspective of what it can do for them as individuals rather than for society as a whole. 

Overall, these younger generations find value in the news that progresses personal development and increases enjoyment or awareness in topics that are relevant to them.

As an example, BBC Global News has recognized this trend and is responding by launching more verticals and sub-brands outside of its regular news cycle. The company states that 62% of its audience across platforms are millennials between 25 and 35 years old. 

The goal is to grow its international audience and drive more advertising revenue by covering topics that are important to younger generations, such as sustainability and environmental issues. 

Friday Fun Fact

Journalists, take note: Merriam-Webster has just added another 533 words and definitions to its dictionary.  New words include ‘dad joke,’ ‘fatberg,’ ‘sesh’ and ‘inspo.’ But the dictionary, which is updated twice a year, has drawn much attention due to its decision to recognize “they/them” as gender-identifying pronouns.

“If we see that a term is used frequently, then it’s going to get into the dictionary,” said Peter Sokolowski, a Merriam-Webster lexicographer.

The fact that the oldest dictionary publisher in the United States has added its interpretation of this pronoun is a reflection of changing times. After all, the dictionary is a window into society’s current use and expression of language.

 

For a more recent media news update, click here.

The Key Engagement Tool Metrics Media Organizations are Losing Out On

There are a number of engagement tools that publishers can leverage to build digital communities. Before you commit to any community engagement solution, we want to make sure you’re fully benefiting from the tools you choose to invest in.

After all, it’s important to monitor a number of key metrics that measure the health and growth of your digital community. As you gather information on how your users are interacting with one another around your content, you can fine-tune your editorial and subscription strategies around audience behavior. Keep in mind that third-party cookies are no longer an effective way to capture your community’s information, meaning you now have to turn to the rich data from your own platform to collect it.

Set your business up for success by ensuring your engagement tools are giving you the following metrics:

Daily, weekly and monthly active users

While the number of new users is important to keep track of and could represent the success of your user acquisition strategies, it fails to take into account churn and loyalty. A growing, active user base, on the other hand, highlights the fact that you’re providing value to your community.

The definition of an active user depends on your individual objectives and product offering. For us, the number of active users includes active commenters, users who authenticate and users who spend more than five seconds reading comments.

A good rule of thumb is to aim for 20-40% of your monthly unique visitors to be in the active user category. 

Engagement Velocity

The engagement velocity is essentially the number of aggregate engagement actions per minute. This is another helpful metric to keep track of that can help predict how popular your content will become based on the speed of user engagement with your front-facing tools.

Use this metric to find out how well your content is resonating with users.

Daily, weekly and monthly active engagement

“Many publishers are focused on fostering deeper engagement with loyal users, who exhibit a higher propensity to return, and ultimately to subscribe,” reads a new report by the Local Media Association.

Be sure to monitor the number of daily, weekly and monthly active engagement on your platform over time and across pages. Over time, it helps you measure the impact of strategic decisions, and across pages, it helps you identify highly engaging pages early on and improve their visibility to maximize conversions.

On average, we see an annual increase of 20% in active engagement across our clients.

Percent of user attention time in comment sections

Time spent on-page is a common metric that publishers keep a close eye on. But to get a thorough understanding of your audience’s engagement level, you need to dig a little bit deeper.

Most users are passive consumers of content — that means they are more likely to read than contribute to a conversation. For this reason, the percent of time users spend reading comments can be a good indicator of community engagement. While engagement will vary depending on article type, our clients see a monthly average of 9.46% to 26.53% of user attention time in commenting sections across their platforms (with some as high as 43%).

Looking to boost this number for your platform?

Last year, Microsoft conducted a study, which concluded that good content is the key to getting users to spend more time engaging with your content. This is especially important as the study found that the human attention span has been reduced from an average of 12 seconds to eight.

Moderated conversations can also be an asset in capturing user attention by helping users feel protected enough to participate in discussions.

Civility Trends

Your audience’s online engagement is in fact dependent on civility — toxicity has a negative impact on engagement, ad revenue and brand image.

To keep track of your community’s online health, monitor civility trends across your platform. This can be as simple as watching the rate of disabled posts (disabled posts / all posts), which allows you to assess at a high level if users, in general, are complying with your community guidelines.

Dive a bit deeper into your engagement tools’ civility trends by monitoring the disabled posts even more closely. If you’re able to classify the reason behind disabling posts, you can monitor the violation trends and create strategies to resolve specific violation types. For example, if you’re seeing a lot of political hostility around an election, you may choose to keep a close eye on related articles in the politics section of your platform.

Here’s an example of one of our moderation dashboards:

Make the most of your engagement solutions by monitoring these metrics on a regular basis, and identify related strengths and weaknesses on your platform. Only then can you adjust your business’ strategies to build a loyal community.

If you’re unsure of where your numbers stand in the media industry, you can use the Google News Initiative tool to see where your data stands and set benchmarks to help your organization grow.

If you liked this article, you’ll love reading about what every publisher should ask a potential tech partner. 

Enhancing Your Paywall: Why You Need a Conversion Strategy

In order to run a profitable media company, publishers know that audience engagement must be monetized. But relying on social media for advertising just isn’t cutting it anymore.

With social media’s unpredictable algorithm changes blocking your content from being seen and its loss of audience trust, it’s time to generate money from your community on your own platforms. And that’s where paywalls come in.

The Value of a Paywall

Nowadays, paywalls are becoming an important ingredient in a news publisher’s recipe for success. Not only do they attach value to your content, but they are also able to manage your subscribers and collect payments on your behalf.

“When clients invest in industry publication subscriptions, it serves as a tangible reminder that the publications… offer quantifiable value,” reads a Forbes article. “It’s content that matters to people — to the point that people are willing to pay for it. This serves as a reminder to your client that your services are worth the price.”

While some may argue that paywalls threaten to repel readers who aren’t willing to pay for your content, it’s a risk that many publishers find worth taking. In fact, readers who are willing to subscribe offer your business significantly more value than those who aren’t.

This past year, HuffPost chose to stop focusing on uninterested readers and, instead, assessed and grew its loyal reader base since 60% of their page views came from just 6% of visitors.

If you have great content and dedicated readers, the decision to take on a paywall may be an obvious one.

However, the power of your paywall can be greatly enhanced by supporting it with a winning conversion strategy.

Amplify the Effects of your Paywall

Readers will pay for quality content that they can relate to. Publications like The New York Times and The Times have shown us this.

But a truly powerful subscription management system relies on support from a community growth and engagement system.

According to the Shorenstein Center and Lenfest Institute, only nine percent of a publisher’s readers view over five articles per month. Their white paper states that “news organizations with larger-than-average “regular readership” – engaging that critical nine percent of audiences – tended to prioritize audience engagement efforts.”

And what better way to grow that number of regular readers than by engaging more of your audience? Applying community engagement technology to your platform will boost a user’s return frequency, session depth and total attention time, helping to drive more subscriptions.

Which is why it’s important to take the time to find a partner who not only boosts user engagement, but who will also work with your paywall provider to optimize your platform for subscriptions. 

Learn how to create real conversations and drive audience engagement to your organization’s publications with this Webinar: How CBC Creates Real Conversations Below the Fold

The Ultimate Conversion Strategy

A truly great conversion strategy marries your paywall and engagement tools together.

In this sense, a community engagement partner can track onsite audience behavior, grow your regular readers and alert your paywall when each user is interested enough to subscribe. Engage your audience. Understand them. And then use that knowledge to build a loyal, paying community.

“Using a mix of editorial and algorithm-based selections, [The Toronto Star] hard locks five to seven articles per day, typically more in-depth pieces driving strong traffic and engagement, to push more visitors toward the paywall and, eventually, the subscription process,” states a recent report by the Local Media Association.

Your engagement and paywall service providers should be able to help you develop and deploy a targeted conversion strategy, specific to the behavior of your readers. More specifically, as users become engaged with your content, your community engagement tools should be able to feed your subscription-ready users right to your paywall. Which means more subscription revenue for you.

Your Churn-Reducing Solution

Another great reason to own a conversion strategy between your engagement and subscription management systems is that you can boost onsite subscriptions and reduce churn, all at the same time. As your engagement tools build your community and track its behavior, your software provider can signal your paywall when a community member becomes disengaged with your brand, and is likely to churn.

Businesses can then send these users special incentives or content to keep them from unsubscribing.

Say goodbye to inefficiency and hello to an abundance of subscription revenue.

Interested in learning more about boosting revenue through subscription management and user engagement? Attend our workshop at ONA19 for a chance to win $500.

Trust in Facebook is at an all-time low: Here’s how media companies can use that to their advantage

Facebook is addictive — for both consumers and advertisers. With over 1.5 billion users accessing Facebook on a daily basis, the social media giant has become a major source of advertising for brands worldwide. However, little by little, the community standards of Facebook have been dropping — and people are noticing.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal, where Facebook leaked data from millions of people to a company that used it to promote political ads, was only the beginning of the platform’s trust fall. Netflix’s documentary, The Great Hack, offers an in-depth view into the scandal.

The social media giant’s sudden and strict algorithm changes have also affected businesses in a negative way. These changes drastically reduced the reach of Facebook posts from publishers, which dropped to as little as two percent of followers.

Even as Facebook races to protect its users, their moderation solution still leaves a lot to be desired. And let’s not forget that one of Facebook’s co-founders penned an article about everything wrong with the company

Tips to capitalize on Facebook’s trust deficit

To help your brand use this mistrust between Facebook and its users as an opportunity to gain loyal community members, we put together a few of our top tips.

Invest in your own platform

With trust in Facebook at such a visible low, there’s never been a better time to start building your brand’s reputation as a trusted media source… on your own domains.

Sure, Facebook can be used to promote content and events —  but only to an extent. You don’t want to be stuck relying entirely on a platform that decides how to promote your content without your input. Thankfully, you have other options. Better options.

Instead of struggling to build your brand on Facebook, invest in tools and strategies that bring engagement back to your domains. You don’t need to stop using Facebook completely. But you also don’t need to give a portion of your revenue away to a platform that doesn’t give you enough exposure for your content. After all, Facebook prioritizes posts from family and friends over posts from advertisers.

Infographic: Americans Do Not Trust Facebook with Personal Info | Statista You will find more infographics at Statista

If you can invest in building a safe and engaging environment on your own domains, individuals will no longer associate your content or brand with the abundance of misinformation on Facebook.

Give the people what they want

Have you ever wondered what it is about Facebook that seems so attractive to users?

People are social creatures. Consumers continue to use Facebook despite our trust issues with the platform simply because we crave socialization and engagement. In fact, an analysis of the media industry has found that engagement is key when it comes to building loyal brand followers.

A report by Salesforce also found that “84% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.”

Facebook, along with other social media platforms, offers many opportunities for users to engage with one another as well as with publishers and their content. However, attaching this immersive social experience to a brand is no longer exclusive to social media platforms.

Consider integrating tools directly on your platform that allow your users to discuss your content, chat with one another, follow their favourite authors and receive content-related notifications based on their preferences.

By generating engagement on your domains, your visitors will want to stick around and subscribe. 

Nurture safe conversations, not toxic comments

Many media professionals find commenting counterproductive to a brand’s development — especially with the rise of trolls, harassment, bullying, misinformation and spam in the digital world. At the end of the day, it’s probably more effective to avoid commenting altogether, right?

Wrong.

To foster a good relationship with your digital community away from social media, you need to craft a solid set of community guidelines and enforce them. According to a new study by the Center for Media Engagement, individuals are more likely to have a negative impression of a domain when 75% of its comments are uncivil.

While it is important to engage your visitors in a social experience, they will only enjoy the experience in a toxic-free environment. This means that on top of providing a social layer for your community, it is also essential that comments are thoroughly moderated and that user data is completely secure.

Enforcing a safe environment will help your community members feel comfortable engaging in, and returning to, your domains.

Produce targeted, reliable content

In the digital age, knowledge is always power. Capturing data on your own domain is, therefore, crucial to your success. More specifically, you can leverage data insights from your community to inform your content strategy. By understanding your community members’ interests as you learn about and track their behavior, you can predict what types of content will perform best.

If you are able to create valuable content that maintains a consistent tone and is highly relevant to your readers, they will start looking to your brand as a reputable source for trusted media.

While Facebook can target content based on people’s interests, your posts are hidden behind the noise of fake news and algorithms in a potentially unpleasant environment. Even as Facebook moves to license news content from publishers, we must be cognizant of the fact that Facebook will still own part of your community. 

Other publishers are also beginning to realize that success in the media is no longer just about directing visitors to your domains — it’s also about keeping them. For too long, publishers and consumers have flocked to Facebook in search of content and community. Unfortunately, both have become problematic on the platform. So, the time is right to create a protected social space around quality content and reclaim your community.

Seven Tips That will Help Your Moderation Team Survive a National Election

One of the biggest challenges for publishers during a national election is, without a doubt, keeping conversations around their content civil and preventing misinformation from tarnishing their platforms.

Whether your company plans to run live updates or craft a few blog posts during a significant political event — such as an election in Canada, the U.S. or anywhere else in the world — your moderation team will have their hands full with an extraordinary volume of opinionated comments.

A recent study conducted by the Center for Media Engagement found that moderators who focused on preventing uncivil comments were affected “on a very personal level, leading to emotional exhaustion and less positive work experience.” This means that an effective moderation team needs to protect more than just the domains they’re assigned to monitor — they also need to protect themselves.

And yet, comments are still essential to your brand’s success.

To help your moderation team maintain civility and accuracy on your platform while keeping their cool, it’s important to empower them as much as possible well in advance of an election.

We spoke with Leigh Adams, the product manager of Viafoura’s moderation services, to help arm your moderation team with the best practices and tips to make it through the election period. Adams also holds over 10 years of experience moderating and developing guidelines for news commenting forums. Read on to discover her must-know election survival tips.

1. Predict probable misinformation

Before moderators can begin battling misinformation, they first need to have a clear, consistent understanding of the kinds of misinformation that are likely to come up. Moderators can then brainstorm different types of rumors and topics that should not be spread on the domains they’re protecting.

For example, according to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, you can expect to see misinformation that generates “fear, intolerance and misinformation about immigration across Canada” during the upcoming 2019 election period. 

“Create a shared document that everyone can print featuring keywords or names to watch for within those categories of misinformation you’ve identified,” Adams says.

This will make it easier for moderators to scan through comments and quickly identify problematic statements.

Viafoura’s moderation team also uses a unique search tool that allows moderators to search comments by specific keywords.

“The quicker you can find and shut down those conversations, the better,” she states.

2. Identify your biases

When was the last time you spoke to a human that was truly neutral towards the political landscape? Everyone has their biases, which can influence their day-to-day actions. Not even moderators are immune.

A study from Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania found that “users who consistently express minority viewpoints are more likely to be moderated than users who consistently express majority viewpoints.”

To ensure your moderation team isn’t enforcing any political bias unintentionally, each moderator must understand what their own biases look like in order to avoid censoring opposing viewpoints.

3. Don’t be afraid to ban users

In the digital world, the general belief is that the more eyeballs a piece of content can get, the better. The end goal for media executives is typically to gain and engage more site visitors in order to maximize subscriptions; however, visitor quantity isn’t always better than quality.

“Don’t be afraid to ban users,” says Adams. She goes on to explain that “a lot of newspapers are afraid to ban users because they want the audience, but when you allow trolls and other toxic users to take over, you’re actually scaring away more valuable visitors.”

Fewer quality commenters offer more value to brands than many commenters that destroy the safety and trust between an organization and its loyal followers.

4. Leverage user account history as a moderation resource

User account history is an extremely useful resource for moderators. Access to information like past comments posted by users and account registration date can help moderators prevent spam and make decisions on what to do with questionable comments.

Adams explains that “if a user posts a couple hundred comments within a few days, chances are, they aren’t posting valuable comments.”

5. Create a thorough emergency procedure

Make sure your moderation team has thoroughly outlined a procedure for comment-related emergencies.

“Let’s say someone threatens to be an active shooter at your headquarters. How do you deal with that type of threat?” Adams asks.

There are a few crucial questions you can ask your team to help them prepare for these types of threats: 

  • Is there a clear chain of command in an emergency? 
  • When do you alert the police versus the organization you’re protecting?

Adams recommends distinguishing between different types of non-urgent, semi-urgent, general and specific threats, and outlining how moderators should react to each of them. 

6. Keep team communication open

Whether your moderation team prefers Slack, Google Hangouts or any other communication tool, it’s best to have a shared chatroom where they can ask each other questions or flag any important information instantly.

“To ensure sanity and consistency, create a shared space where your team can feel supported enough to ask for help,” Adams suggests. “When someone needs to make a judgment call on a comment, having open communication with the rest of the team is very empowering.”

7. Take Breaks

If you need a break as a moderator, you need to ask for one. Don’t feel like you need to power through the rush of comments until the end of your shift. Maintain visibility over everyone’s workload as well so team members can assist one another when needed. That way, your moderation team will be well-equipped to prevent the volume of comments from getting out of control.

Adams elaborates on how this can be accomplished: “We use a moderation tool that was created in-house, which lets other moderators on the team see one another’s workload. It can also alert others when you’re away from the keyboard so that someone else can take over.”

A moderator’s role can be mentally draining, so if you need a break for the sake of your mental health, you owe it to yourself to take one. After all, you need to protect yourself before you can effectively protect others.

Want a Higher Reader Retention Rate? Look to Your Commenting Section

How do you get readers to stay on your site longer, read more articles and engage with your digital community?

Earlier this year, we did a deep dive into three months of anonymous, aggregate data from our media partners. The goal was to learn — and share — insights around how reader activity in comment sections has an impact on visitor retention and engagement.

In our data dive, we looked at over two billion pageviews on publisher pages in the first quarter of this year. We learned that readers who were logged into Viafoura spent over two million hours on customer domains and 565,595 hours in comment sections.  

We then compared logged-in users to those who were not in order to identify how their behavior differed. The findings:

We also looked at how audiences engage with others when logged in. In analyzing nearly 2.5 million actions on more than 430,000 comments, we discovered that people are a little nicer than you might initially think: 

Our findings illustrate that comment sections allow for civil, real-time conversations, creating a highly engaged community of authors, readers and influencers. These individuals can then turn into paying subscribers if your website is properly moderated. In other words, real-time commenting enhances audience engagement, which can build reader loyalty in your brand’s online community. 

Through our suite of products, our partners can access first-party data for real-time commenting behavior, content consumption habits and more. This allows our customers to measure the impact engagement has on brand loyalty, and drive meaningful business value.

Request a demo to learn how Viafoura can help your organization build an engaged community.

The Connection Between Human Habit and Brand Loyalty

Naturally, humans are creatures of habit. We visit the same restaurants, stick to the same daily commute and speak to the same people on a regular basis. According to a recent report developed by Hootsuite, people spend an average of two and a half hours on social media each day, browsing the same feeds and reacting to the same media brands.  

So what exactly does this have to do with your company’s website? To put the answer simply: shaping those repetitive user behaviors on your site can help your brand build a loyal online community.  

NiemLab published an article detailing how to turn subscribers into loyal followers based on their habits. In the article, NiemLab outlines how The Wall Street Journal tracked the actions of new members during the first 100 days after subscribing, and then used the data to create an engagement strategy that would improve retention rates.  

“We know that publishers are focused on habit formation,” explains Dan Seaman, Viafoura’s product director for engagement tools. “All the definitions of loyalty are starting to converge around habit signals. A company’s website engagement strategy should be adjusted based on those behaviors.” 

Loyalty is fueled by habit. This means that in order to convert website visitors and subscribers to loyal brand followers, each company must create a unique strategy to improve user engagement habits.  

The Wall Street Journal also found that the top trends in retention were driven by habits: repeated visits to a website section, reading regularly-published content and interacting with more passive media like video. 

To help kick off your own company’s retention strategy, our engagement specialists suggest following a few best practices:  

Gather as much raw data as possible

Before you can begin suggesting new ways to engage and re-engage website visitors, you need to have a thorough understanding of their regular behaviors.  

To do so, be sure you have a way to gather raw data — in a secure, lawful way — resulting from every onsite action, including subscriptions, app or information downloads and other forms of website engagement. You can then analyze your data to gain valuable information on the habits of your company’s online community.  

Maximize the opportunity for interaction

“It’s not just newsletters and content itself that drives loyalty,” states Seaman. “It turns out that there’s a broad range of actions people take and habits they form that contribute to retention.” 

In other words, it’s important to serve up plenty of tools and features right on your website to engage your online community over and over again.  

As Viafoura’s product manager, Mehrad Karamlou, explains, one of the key takeaways from The Wall Street Journal’s study is that “the first 100 days after a person’s first interaction with your company is your opportunity to re-engage them.”  

Give your website visitors the opportunity to interact with your company in multiple ways during that impressionable period. After all, boosting engagement is a great way to boost retention.  

Include a social layer on your site

Adding a safe and well-managed social layer to your website, where users can share information with one another, is a great way to encourage ongoing interactions from visitors.  

Tools that enable meaningful conversations include real-time chat, live blogging & commenting, site-wide moderation, community management and push notifications. They help to ensure that people interacting on your owned and operated digital properties are forming meaningful connections with your brand.

At the end of the day, every brand is completely different and will need to create a unique strategy to build loyal visitors.

How The Irish Times Uses Audience Data to Build Engaged Communities with Quality Content

Sometimes the solution to a complicated problem means thinking outside the box.

Or outside the country.

Just ask Patrick Logue, the digital editor of the Irish Times. Logue joined the 160-year-old paper in 1996 when its website was just two years old, a shadow of the print edition.

In the more than two decades since his arrival, the editor has seen the paper move away from the traditional newsstand sales-dependent model and transform into a profitable multi-platform media organization that in recent years has actually seen its audience grow.

“It’s been a mammoth task,” says Logue of the transitions he’s witnessed. “The traditional model is broken, so we’re creating a new one focused on finding new audiences and revenue.”

As other Irish papers have watched their circulation numbers shrink, Logue and his team are drawing in new readers in droves – and not from where or how you might think.

Paywall Innovator

Back 2015, print sales at the Times were plummeting and online advertising was hardly making up for it. The Times’ circulation had dropped 45 percent in the previous five years, and things were looking dire. It felt like a race to the bottom, as other publications pumped out click-bait stories in pursuit of page views.

The Times made a bold decision. Instead of focusing on page views in the hopes of generating advertising revenue, they would create premium content that users would be willing to pay for. Up until then, all the major Irish dailies had been providing their online content for free.

That year, the Times became the first Irish daily to introduce a digital “leaky” paywall meaning readers could view 10 articles for free each week, but to read more, they had to subscribe for either 12 or 16 euros ($13.40 or $17.86) a month. “We decided that we were not going to chase traffic in an aggressive manner,” says Logue.

The other benefit of this approach? Developing content paying readers want.

Logue says the paper then began using the new data generated by online readership to discover what was important to readers — be it abortion laws, Irish History, or these days, Brexit.

“We become the experts on these big issues,” he says. “We break things down in simple ways using explainers, infographics, and evergreen digital content that informs the reader.”

This dedicated focus on quality has led to several Times stories dominating global news cycles. A story reporting the Times’ exit poll of the 2018 abortion referendum was viewed more than a million times, with the BBC breaking into regular programming to report the poll’s results. An editorial about Donald Trump’s ties to fascism by revered columnist Fintan O’Toole broke the paper’s record with 1.3 million page views.

”“The traditional model is broken, so we’re creating a new one focused on finding new audiences and revenue.”

Patrick LogueDigital Editor, The Irish Times

Data-driven Community Building

Audience data has continued to reveal unexpected opportunities to develop active, loyal communities with existing readers. For example, one of Logue’s responsibilities is to search for new, untapped readers, and he was surprised to find them beyond Ireland’s borders.

“We recognized that there is a large Irish diaspora around the world,” he says of the one in six people born in Ireland who now lives overseas. “They’re hungry for a sense of community and for information from home.”

To satiate this audience, Logue created the paper’s Abroad Network. Readers anywhere in the world can sign up and will receive a weekly email containing a collection of Times stories as well as e-ballots to participate in polls about important political events.

”“We recognized there is a large Irish diaspora...they're hungry for a sense of community and for information from home.”

Patrick LogueDigital Editor, The Irish Times

Abroad Network readers are also encouraged to contribute as photographers, writers or interviewees to the online project Generation Emigration, a digital section featuring the images and personal narratives of Irish readers living abroad, including a personal report from New Zealand after the Christchurch mass shooting in New Zealand, reports from the front lines of climate change in Australia, and numerous essays on Brexit from Irish citizens living in the United Kingdom.

“We found these readers were looking for a sense of community and were also willing to contributing content,” he says. “Generation Emigration brought in a new audience, and in a very real sense created that community.”

Logue explains that the overall goal is to drive traffic, engagement and ultimately subscriptions while at the same time bringing in ad revenue. It has proved effective — some 35 percent of the Times’ page views now come from outside Ireland, and the Abroad Network has 35,000 members.

This two-fold approach of quality content and community building within its readership has been an important part of the strategy that has kept the Times in the black in recent years.

An audit of the paper in February of 2019 showed digital edition daily circulation of 21,275 — a 26 percent increase over the previous year. The paper also grew its total daily circulation by two percent to 79,406, with sales of digital subscriptions rising more quickly than the decline of print. As such, digital revenue has grown by 8.7 percent in 2018 even as print sales dropped by 8 percent. The paper posted a €2 million euro (US$2,200,000) profit last year — which is no small feat in today’s newspaper market.

Read more about how media companies can drive retention, loyalty and trust in our guide.

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