Category: Engagement

1. Publishers are getting really good at defining the value of user-generated content (UGC) to the business.

When discussing community-centric approaches with execs, I often bring up my favorite FT Strategies piece showcasing Der Standard super-users (top commenters). It covers 2 main points:

• Der Standard did the math: their highest value user segment are community- engaged members
• They centralized their operations to have business units focus on funneling users into community engagement (aka: study them, talk to them, design with them).

I love this piece because the organization doubled down on attributing a $ value to the community, and for a numbers nerd like me, this is the north star of our ‘why’and single most important number in rallying the many teams it takes to make a community strategy successful.

Here’s the baseline of ROI of community engagement:

• Attributed registration & subscription conversion
• Direct ad activation dollars
• Downstream impact of engagement defined by additional Time on Site and PV’s generated by community contributors and those who spend time consuming their content

The new expanded impact areas:

• User Generated Content (UGC) as a story idea generator
• Editorial Engagement sponsorships (Think: commercial teams selling sponsored AMAs)
• The effect of the flywheel of UGC on your unknown audiences and their propensity to register and subscribe

An anecdotal thought: It’s interesting to me how quickly publishers are beginning to see ROI from community on day 01 of launching community and how naturally user behaviors gravitate toward community (the uptick is almost immediate). The appetite for community is there, and users genuinely enjoy engaging with one another, when the community is well managed and stays within brand community guidelines. In the same breath, moderation at scale and duty of care to your editorial team is more important than ever and that needs to be acknowledged and recognized.

2. Journalists are becoming rockstars again.

This is hands down my favorite highlight because we are deliberately repairing a decade-long rip and divide caused by the cesspool of social media. It’s baffling to think how we got here given publishing at its core is a product of the communities we serve, so how can publishers, by virtue, hate interacting with communities?

My gut says they don’t, and my gut says they’re scared from their experiences on social media.

The good news is this is a simple fix but requires a high degree of change management – let the AMAs do the heavy lifting here. This past year, we’ve had a record-breaking % of publishers dip their toe into community engagement, and we’ve had a 100% success rate (defined as repeat initiative).

From an engagement perspective, the results are a pretty clear win: AMAs drive 2x more registrations, 3x more first time commenters, 24x more engagement & 16x more time in comments.

Pretty slam dunk but that’s not the purpose of this highlight- it’s actually the softer side:

• Every time we’ve run a first time AMA, journalists have requested to stay longer because they genuinely had FUN
• Commenters opened their questions with “Thank you so much for doing this” – a little goes a long way
• 100% re-engagement rate by newsroom staff

Next year, this is going to take center stage in many newsrooms for a couple of key reasons:

1. This is a low-lift experiential interaction for your community with a high reward.
2. It’s safe. Turning on a full pre-moderated approach builds trust with newsrooms and lets journalists step into their fandom 🤘

Customer Spotlight: People.com has started leaning into AMAs and going all in with targeted invites, social recirc, and onsite discoverability during the event.

3. Editorial KPIs: “First Time Commenters” will have a seat at the table.

You’re going to hear me talk a lot about this in the year to come. Knowing the $$$ value of a UGC contributor, your First Time Commenters should be reported in your dashboards, right beside your conversion numbers.

This should be volumes, time to first comment, and % of all new registered users. Here’s what it looks like in practice with a real customer:

• Average of 9,295 first time commenters per month
• 10.6% of all new registrations interact with the community in the same day
• Average of 14.1 minutes for first comment action post registration

Once you’ve got this in, start digging into the mechanics of what prompted your conversions. What drove users to comment? What user ideas drove the most engagement and was there a debate sparked? Was there anything very sentimental that drew people together?

Out loud: This is a slam dunk for GenAI if you’re looking to automate the sentiment of highly-commented conversations and delivering ideas for follow ups to spark ideas in newsrooms.

4. The homepage will be the community page.

Homepages are transforming with more interactivity for users and a big part of that is the concept of active conversations/ top quality comments/ hot takes. You’ve seen these trending on social and you’ll see it transformed on publisher pages as well- again not recreating the wheel, but doing it better.

The concept of bridged discussion, unlike divisive, engagement-driven trends, is poised to be a key player here.

What’s bridging? An academic approach for countering destructive divisiveness across ranking, recommenders, and governance. We’ve partnered with our good friends at Jigsaw, a division of Google, to apply bridging attribution qualifiers to develop a comment quality ranking. We’re able to apply this mechanism at scale and completely reshape the perceived comment quality.  The goal here is fairly substantive—arguably beyond just the comment section—as it tackles a broader conversational divide that has emerged, largely due to social media algorithms pinning people against each other.

Here’s what our data shows when we apply bridging qualifiers to shape quality commenting:

• Perceived Comment Quality is up 101%
• Perceived Comment Toxicity is down 36%
• Community-Led Registrations are up 20%
• First Time Commenters are up 6%
• Editors Interaction in the comment section is up 122%

What does all of this tell us? By deliberately promoting higher quality comments (personal storytelling, nuance, compassion, & others) not only do our perceptions of community change for the better, but our interactions become more meaningful.

With confidence in the mechanisms and technology, publishers are using this to highlight quality community as a credit-worthiness of trust on their highest traffic page: home page, baby.

5. Publishers will chip bigger pieces of traffic back from social.

By no means do I hate social media- in fact, some of the largest publishers in the world have built a social-first strategy for growth and holy shit it worked (at least for a while). But building your business model on the current state of social algorithms, which can change at any moment, is very risky, and the only path to stability is owning that audience and the relationship with them.

Publishers are leaning into some really cool recirc initiatives in capturing new audiences on moving over to O&O, and while it’s a little early to share wins, I’m keeping my eyes on targeted audience acquisition for X, formerly Twitter, and Reddit.

One to watch: Rachel Duffy at The Telegraph.

Parallel, I’m also excited to see the big shift toward the creator economy and how that can look for local media. With elections closing out, and a retro on the Kamala campaign, there’s a big highlight on reach with podcasts and the influence creators have over traditional media.I’m wondering if we can see a collab for both next year.

To wrap my musings, I want to settle on the concept of “brands are moats”. If our brand is aging, and by virtue our audiences too, brands get smaller and the word of the brand moves on.

So what makes publishing brands successful and competitive in today’s day-in-age?

First will always be your core offering: trust from your core market.

But second and emerging is the power of your community: a parallel of trust.

Communities are moats.

Feeling hopeful for 2025, watch our space.

The Future of Publishing: Communities as Competitive Differentiators

 As the publishing industry continues to evolve, those who invest in building loyal, active communities will emerge as the leaders in audience engagement and monetization. For executives, the question is no longer whether to build a community, but how to do so effectively and at scale. 

By treating community as a strategic priority, focusing on intentional cultivation, and operationalizing engagement at every level, you can position your organization to thrive in the future of publishing. Communities are no longer just a way to engage readers—they are a critical engine for growth, loyalty, and revenue in the digital age.

If you’re ready to build a thriving community, partner with Viafoura. Our platform equips you with the tools and insights to engage, activate, and monetize your audience with ease. Now is the time to act—don’t miss out on this generational opportunity.

From Passive Audiences to Active Communities

Traditional brand content experiences often result in passive and fleeting audience engagement. These audiences are largely disengaged and unmotivated, offering limited value to brands. In contrast, communities are characterized by active participation, collaboration, creativity, and a strong sense of connection and loyalty. As community-building expert Greg Isenberg notes, building such communities involves several key elements:

1. Togetherness: Providing spaces for collective interaction.
2. Rituals: Establishing regular activities that foster a sense of routine.
3. Identity: Cultivating a shared sense of purpose among members.
4. Belonging: Creating a feeling of being part of something larger.
5. Engagement: Encouraging ongoing contribution and interaction independent of direct brand involvement.

The Viafoura Digital Experience Platform: Enabling Community Building

Viafoura’s Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is at the forefront of this transformation, offering a comprehensive suite of tools designed to enhance user engagement, personalization and data utilization. Trusted by over 800 global media brands, Viafoura’s DXP empowers brands to create dynamic, interactive communities through features such as:

• Engagement Suite: Facilitates real-time interactions with conversations, live Q&A sessions, and polls.
• Moderation Tools: Combines AI and human moderation to maintain respectful and relevant discourse.
• Personalization: Delivers tailored content recommendations and personalized feeds.
• Data Insights: Leverages first-party data for deep user behavior insights, driving targeted engagement strategies.

The Transformative Impact of Community Members

Community members significantly outperform standard audiences in terms of engagement and revenue generation. According to Viafoura’s data:

• Community members have a 5.3x higher increase in dwell time compared to regular audiences.
• They are 45x more likely to subscribe.
• They drive 3x more site visits.

These statistics highlight the outsized impact that engaged community members can have on a brand’s success. By focusing on building and nurturing communities, brands can achieve higher levels of engagement, loyalty, and ultimately, profitability.

Practical Steps for Building Robust Communities

To build thriving communities, brands should consider the following steps:

1. Define Your Community’s Purpose: Clearly communicate the community’s goals and values to attract like-minded individuals.
2. Create Valuable Content: Consistently provide content that is relevant, informative, and engaging. This will keep members interested and active within the community.
3. Encourage Interaction: Use interactive tools like real-time comments, live chats, Q&A sessions, and polls to facilitate real-time interaction among members.
4. Recognize and Reward Contributions: Acknowledge active members and reward their contributions. This can be done through shout-outs, badges, or exclusive content.
5. Leverage Data: Use first-party data to understand your members better and tailor your engagement strategies accordingly.

Conclusion

The shift from an audience-centric to a community-focused strategy is imperative for success in today’s attention economy. Viafoura’s digital experience platform provides the tools necessary to make this transition, enabling brands to create engaging, personalized, and data-driven experiences. By fostering a sense of togetherness, establishing rituals, and encouraging ongoing engagement, brands can build loyal communities that drive substantial value.

We’ve bounced back to regular norms in almost every way post Covid era but there’s one area that continues to grow for connectivity: the comment section.

• Will Trump win the next election? 
• Will Caitlin Clark’s surgance in the WNBA turn a new leaf for the sport?
• Was Jeremey from Love is Blind engaged while filming for the show?

We can share our hopes, our fears, our thoughts, our opinions, with everyone, everywhere, within seconds. In these times of economic uncertainty, and political animosity, comment sections have been transformed into a veritable battleground that my team and I wade into daily.

And publishers are stuck in the middle. As they strive to provide a space for their readers to engage, and exchange ideas, they are faced with increasingly divisive rhetoric, calls for free speech competing with increasing attempts to legislate online accountability.

I have spent over 15 years wading into the comments, keeping the pulse on how users react when news breaks, and the last few years have seen an unparalleled rise in incivility. When I meet with our clients to address this challenge, we look at what we can solve with our technology and the latest features, and quite often we’ll talk about how they want users to behave, without actually spelling it out. In the coming weeks I’ll dive deeper into what publishers can do, but ultimately comment sections are there for the users, and I firmly believe that is where change needs to start. Publishers write the rules of engagement, moderators enforce them, but only users can actually create a community. 

My years of watching communities grow, and fight, and celebrate has given me perspective on what does and does not work when it comes to responding to others online, guiding principles for how to model constructive criticism and civility. 

With a small dose of mindfulness and compassion, you can help make comment sections what they are meant to be, and what the majority of readers want them to be – a place where people of all stripes and colors can engage in an open, and civilized exchange of ideas.

1. Pause Before You Post:
   It’s easy to get caught up in the heat of the moment and fire off a hastily composed response. Take a moment to consider the tone and content of your comment. Imagine you were using your real name. Ask yourself: Is it constructive? Is it respectful? Will it contribute positively to the conversation? If the answer to any of these questions is no, then maybe it’s best left unsaid.
2. Keep It Civil:
   Remember that behind every username is a real person with thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Avoid personal attacks, insults, and derogatory language. We all have an uncle or grandparent who might not share our views on housing affordability, or who will win the Superbowl, and yet, we manage to converse without calling them names. Disagreement is natural, but how you choose to express it is often the difference between “content enabled” and “content deactivated.” Fun fact: moderators are trained to work against bias and will not remove comments simply because they don’t like what you said – over 95% of comments that are removed for personal attacks could be approved if they were edited to follow this rule. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it
3. Stick To The Topic:
   Stay on topic and relevant to the discussion at hand. While everything can be connected through enough tangents, comments should remain relevant to the primary thrust of the page.  Off-topic remarks can derail conversations and lead to confusion and frustration for other participants. Fun fact #2: Comments about moderation are almost always off-topic
4. Fact-Check Before You Share:
   Publishers are increasingly cracking down on mis/disinformation that can spread like wildfire in commenting sections. Misleading or false information can stoke the flames, and contribute to confusion and misunderstandings. Take the time to fact-check your sources and provide evidence to support your claims beyond the original source. You can check out Google’s fact checking tools and tips here.
5. Fight Fair:
   If someone offers constructive criticism or differing viewpoints, repeat step 1. Before responding, try to understand where they might be coming from, to approach it with an open mind. Engage in thoughtful discussion and be willing to reconsider your own perspectives. Remember, it’s okay to agree to disagree respectfully. And admitting you are wrong can go a long way to bridging divides.
6. Don’t Feed the Trolls, Report Them:
   When you (inevitably) encounter users who do not play by these principles, it can be tempting to jump in and point out their missteps, tell them how wrong they are, or correct their misinformation. However, the most productive thing you can do is to not further escalate the conflict, but use flagging or reporting tools available on-site to let moderators know so they can take action. But be careful! Reporting content that doesn’t violate guidelines may land you in the hot seat.

Navigating online comment sections can be a daunting task, but with a commitment to civility, respect, and thoughtful engagement, you can help create a more positive and constructive digital environment. Remember, behind every screen is a human being deserving of empathy and understanding. So the next time you venture into the wild west of online commentary, do so with kindness and integrity.