Mastering Live Blogs: Strategies That Drive Positive Results

Spotlight

  • With the right features and applications, live blogs can help publishers enhance their content strategies. 
  • ClickOnDetroit created a Vaccine Hunter live blog that generated a significant amount of engagement: 50,000 views, over four million impressions and positive user feedback.
  • The Baltimore Sun’s live sports blog pulled Tweets in from several staff members to attract digital visitors to its site. 
  • The National Post provided a safe, trusted place to share important election information through various post formats.
  • The Morning Call’s COVID-19 blog featured short updates, which pointed to longer in-depth articles.
  • The Online News Association hosted a live blog to share key event takeaways for attendees. 

Viafoura’s live blog tools trigger increased content consumption, audience satisfaction and brand loyalty.

What kind of content experience will keep consumers informed and engaged online? That’s the million-dollar question that practically every publisher struggles with. 

Luckily, media companies have begun to notice that the live blog format can be a dependable way to share critical content and maximize the time audiences spend on publisher properties.

[2020] reminded publishers how valuable live news, updates and analysis can be to readers,” writes Digiday Senior Editor Max Willens. “The relentless bombardment of big stories gave publishers a fresh chance every month to break down what was going on for readers in areas ranging from public health to politics to sports to business.”

There’s no doubt that live blogs are loaded with perks. You just need to figure out what kind of live blog works best for your organization — and how your editorial team can implement it successfully. 

Get some inspiration to enhance your company’s content strategy by checking out some effective live blogs below.

ClickOnDetroit’s Vaccine Hunter Live Blog

When Ken Haddad, a digital content manager for a ClickOnDetroit, realized that thousands of people couldn’t find vaccine appointments, he launched a live blog to help. 

Haddad’s Vaccine Hunter-style live blog acted as a single place people could turn to in Michigan for critical vaccine updates and appointment openings. 

In addition, essential information was pinned to the top of the live blog to ensure that it stood out to page visitors. 

Haddad’s posts also engaged visitors by allowing audience members to upvote, downvote and share updates across platforms to their networks of friends and family.   

Since the project’s inception, ClickOnDetroit’s live blog has earned an incredible amount of attention, including over 150,000 views, four million impressions to Haddad’s Twitter account and positive visitor feedback.

The Baltimore Sun’s Live Sports Blog

Many journalists already Tweet regularly to keep their followers updated as newsworthy events and sports games unfold. So why not move that content away from the misinformation and social media trolls and ingest it right onto your company’s digital properties?

That’s precisely what The Baltimore Sun did. 

To give audience members real-time commentary and updates on a major football game in early 2021, The Baltimore Sun pulled in Tweets from several staffers into its live blog

As a result, the media company was able to attract and engage sports fans right on its website in return for ongoing, accurate recaps and content on the game.

National Post’s Election Live Blog

No national election is complete without an overwhelming amount of information and aggressive opinions on social media. And since 80% of people will turn away from news coverage near toxic content, posting live election updates on social media is counterproductive for any media company hoping to build a reputation as a trusted resource. 

For these reasons, the National Post ran a live blog to provide audiences with a reliable, safe space to follow the 2019 Canadian election.

The National Post also used Viafoura’s live blogging tool during the election, which gave them the ability to cover the event thoroughly using a combination of updates, social media posts and images.

The Morning Call’s COVID-19 Live Blog

In the spring of 2020, The Morning Call launched a live blog to help Pennsylvanians monitor COVID-19 and related restrictions in their region.

The media company cleverly used the live blog as a way to push readers to longer content pieces. This meant that writers didn’t need to continuously recap old information in new content since all background information could be accessed on the live blog. Plus, they could keep their updates concise, highlighting only vital information. 

The short updates, which can touch on a story from several different perspectives or angles, gives readers a good snapshot of a publisher’s breadth of coverage,” Willens explains.

ONA’s Live Event Blog

With many businesses hosting events to grow revenue or audiences, there’s a tremendous opportunity to engage people before, during and after these events online. And some organizations are now seeing the live blog as an appealing tool to build audience interest around their events.

The Online News Association (ONA), for instance, decided to leverage Viafoura’s live blog to engage attendees during ONA NYC, an event for media professionals. 

ONA published noteworthy takeaways from ONA NYC, offering attendees one place to return to for essential highlights and information. 

With the support of live blogs, publishers can satisfy audiences, boost content consumption, and encourage visitors to spend more time viewing and relying on their coverage. 

If you’re interested in learning about Viafoura’s live blogging tool, you can access a complete list of its features here.

Are You Prepared for the End of Gigya Comments?

Gigya Comments Deprecate on January 31st, 2021

In case you haven’t heard yet, Gigya — an identity management software company acquired by SAP — is currently in the process of shutting down several of its engagement tools, including its commenting services.

Customers that rely on Gigya Comments to build an engaged community of loyal visitors now have until the end of January 31st, 2021 to transition away from Gigya’s social engagement tools.

The full list of tools and features that will be inaccessible come January 31st include: 

If you’re currently a customer at Gigya and are struggling to make sense of the upcoming changes, we’ve broken down the main takeaways based on Gigya’s announcement for you below.

The Impact on Gigya Customers

Starting December 2020, Gigya Comments along with the other social tools mentioned above will begin to shut off, leaving customers without their engagement tools. 

To continue building highly engaged and loyal communities, organizations will need to move to a new community-building service provider. 

This means that existing Gigya customers hoping to keep their online social spaces active must begin preparing now for the migration. User data and comment history will need to be exported and backed up over the next few weeks while access to this information lasts.

Accessing Your Data

All back-end access and support for Gigya Comments and other social engagement features will stop as of January 31st, 2020. Any user data, comment history and existing moderation information stored by Gigya must be manually extracted and saved by customers before that date.

Your user engagement data is full of precious, actionable information, so be sure to collect it while it’s still possible to do so.

You can access a complete checklist that will help prepare your organization for a smooth transition away from Gigya Comments here.

Embracing These Changes

Although the loss of Gigya Comments may seem like a setback to your business, you can use this challenge as an opportunity to select a reliable audience engagement platform.

By continuing to invest in community engagement, you can elevate your visitor’s online experience, strengthen relationships with your users and increase the amount of time they spend on your website or app. 

That’s why it’s vital for you to choose the right engagement tool provider as you transition away from Gigya Comments. 

At Viafoura, customers can rely on our real-time conversations and discussion-based tools to collect first-party audience data, keep their brands safe and better build and monetize their communities. Our automatic moderation system also handles up to 95% of comments without human intervention and makes decisions according to your community guidelines all to ensure that your online communities flourish.

Get in touch with us here to find out how Viafoura can help you transition away from Gigya with ease.

Why Identity Resolution Can Help You Future-Proof Your Businesses

Is your media company converting anonymous visitors into registered users and then monitoring their behavior? To help secure your company’s future, it’s worth transforming your website’s visitors into identifiable and trackable community members. 

Real-time data collection, analysis and targeting is the glue that keeps customers engaged with relevant information,” states a report by FIPP, a global publishing association. 

Rather than guessing how to invest in your brand’s consumer experience, you can use data to piece together an accurate picture of your digital community. That way, you’ll understand how to cater to consumers as their interests change.

Read on to discover why understanding your community through identity resolution is part of the winning formula that leads to sustainable business growth.

Understanding Identity Resolution

How well can you truly know your online community if you don’t analyze each individual? That’s where identity resolution comes in.

“Identity resolution offers a 360-degree view of an individual and the ability to effectively identify a person across multiple devices by recognizing and connecting individual data points, allowing marketers and publishers to form a clear idea of who their customers are on an individual level — and more importantly, how, where and when to best reach them,” Digiday explains.

In other words, media companies can piece together consumer identities and behaviors on their properties to get a complete understanding of their communities.

The identity resolution process offers insight into what types of content and experiences are most impactful on consumers. If you can gather a detailed view of your online visitors, you can meet your community’s ever-changing needs.

The Hidden Power of Known Visitors

Between the consumers coming and going from your digital properties on different devices and those toggling between browsers, it can feel practically impossible to keep tabs on your audience.

Now consider how simple this process could be if your anonymous visitors had to register for premium features or events on your platform.

With a registration process in place, your visitors will no longer be anonymous as they travel and interact across your site’s pages. 

Transforming your anonymous visitors into known users comes with a handful of benefits for media companies. One significant advantage is that you’ll have more information on your audience members, which can be used to improve their experience with your brand. 

And using identity resolution to customize on-site experiences for consumers is key to boosting subscription revenueAccording to subscription solutions provider Piano’s research, the average conversion rate of registered users is 10x that of anonymous visitors,” writes Faisal Kalim, a business journalist from What’s New In Publishing.

Prioritizing User Registrations in a World Without Third-Party Cookies

Having a firm grasp of your community’s identity is essential to securing the future of both your subscription and ad revenues.

Until recently, third-party data has been a primary way for businesses to gather information on visitors. With the ongoing move to phase third-party cookies out across internet browsers, using first-party data to understand and track visitors is a clear, sustainable step forward. 

Converting anonymous visitors to registered users is an effective way to gather that first-party data, keep track of your users and match their movements and information to your subscriber list. After all, the last thing anyone wants is a disconnected view of user behavior as they register, subscribe and switch between devices. 

“Registration is part of the funnel to growing reader engagement and donations while improving advertising quality and targeting so the benefit will be twofold to both strands of revenue,” explains Alice Pickthall, a senior analyst at a subscription research company.

A registration process offers insight into each community member. As a result, you can provide them with personalized, consistent experiences that suit their interests and behaviors. 

You can also work with your advertisers to produce high-performing, targeted ads based on your community’s data.

The better a company understands its visitors, the better it can target ads to them and engage them, improving the experience for community members, staff and advertisers.

How Viafoura Can Help

Not all community-building and engagement solutions in the media landscape will offer you access to your community’s first-party data. 

At Viafoura, we know that your on-site audience data controls the fate of your business. That’s why our engagement solution gives you complete access to your user data while meeting your information security and compliance needs. 

Our engagement tools also offer flexible login options, allowing anyone to register to use our engagement tools on partner websites. The Viafoura solution can connect to your subscription service as well for a unified, consistent view of your community. 

Ultimately, identity resolution can help to inform your business decisions, strengthening your community and revenue streams. To start learning about your visitors’ identities and using that knowledge to build a thriving community, get in touch with Viafoura.

Announcing Viafoura’s New Performance-Based Pricing Plan — No License Fees. No Overage Fees. No-Brainer.

Interested in joining a growing list of publishers — like Reach PLC, Tribune Publishing, Postmedia and Media News Group — who are leveraging Viafoura’s new performance-based pricing plan to scale their community engagement strategies?

Good news for publishers and media companies everywhere: Viafoura is now offering its entire audience engagement and community-building platform free of charge through an ad-supported pricing model.

“Media companies are quickly realizing that the key to sustainability is creating a highly engaged, loyal community,” says Jesse Moeinifar, Founder and CEO of Viafoura. 

Unfortunately, many available community-building solutions are either expensive, require huge amounts of internal effort or are low quality. But now you can have the best of all worlds. 

“Our ad-supported revenue model offers all media companies equal access to the tools and services they need to build a profitable community, regardless of their financial resources,” Moeinifar adds.

This means that companies are now able to build and monetize an active community online by hosting ads and subscription offers within Viafoura’s widgets

Rather than having to pay a recurring license fee, our new pricing model is powered by revenue earned through ads and offers running on Viafoura’s tools. Companies can then reap the rewards of their engaged communities — including more subscriptions, long-term loyalty and new incremental revenue.

Customers using our platform saw a 44% increase in comments, 34% increase in average session length and 38% increase in total on-site engagement. 

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Explore how Viafoura’s ad-supported pricing plan can benefit your business below.

Flexible Advertising

With advertisers gradually increasing their budgets as restrictions around the pandemic ease up, it’s the perfect time to optimize your ad spaces for engagement.

Viafoura offers a wide range of flexible advertising opportunities to satisfy all of your ad-related needs.  

For example, you can choose which of our widgets run advertisements, select ad positions and set ad frequency:

trending conversations

We also give you the option to work with our brand-safe, premium advertising partners to maximize CPM/eCPM rates. Alternatively, you can use your own ad-serving platform.

Finally, you have the freedom to define your blacklists and run any of your in-house or third-party ads and offers.

Maximize Engagement With Your Ads

Research has proven that digital social spaces attract active community members.

Since we embed advertisements right into social spaces, media companies like yours can expect a high level of engagement with their ads. Companies that have implemented our ad-supported model have seen a 3-5x increase in click-through rates (CTRs), over 80% viewability of ads and significant gains in overall ad performance. 

“It’s a way to isolate your most engaged audience and put ads in front of them,” says Dan Seaman, VP of product at Viafoura. 

Take your community’s experience with your business to the next level using first-party data from our engagement tools. Simply gather insights from your community’s engagement data to target ads and content to consumers based on their behavior and interests.

Ultimately, our ad-supported revenue model is a way for you to build and monetize a thriving community of loyal brand advocates… all without straining your budget. 

Interested in joining a growing list of publishers — like Reach PLC, Tribune Publishing, Postmedia and Media News Group — who are leveraging Viafoura’s new performance-based model to scale their community engagement strategies? 

Get in touch with us here to find out if our ad-supported pricing plan is right for your business. 

Meet The Newest Way to Re-Engage Your Audience

Wouldn’t it be great if you could drive more user engagement on your digital properties without adding to your already endless workload? Viafoura’s new recirculation feature — a tool that highlights trending conversations around content — can do exactly that.  

The feature analyzes engagement velocity and content recency in order to recommend buzzing, active conversations to your digital community. As a result, audience members who actively engage with your community will easily find more content that interests them. 

For those of you who have yet to implement conversation tools on your digital properties, our data shows that that they can boost total time spent on site by 10%. 

Active comment readers spend the most time engaging with your digital properties. In fact, according to the Financial Times’ community manager, these users offer six times the engagement compared to non-comment readers. This means that they are extremely valuable members of your community. The recirculation widget exists to keep these users interacting with your content for even longer, and has proven to generate up to seven times more pageviews from comment readers. 

Surprised? We’re not. Humans naturally want to socialize with others, whether that be offline or online. Conversation tools that are backed by effective moderation offer your audience members the opportunity to be social and build meaningful connections to your brand. Our new tool lets consumers who value discussions related to your content know where active conversations are taking place. Especially around topics that resonate the most with them.

And that translates into more on-site engagement for you.

A major North American newspaper recently implemented the recirculation widget on its digital properties. After just two weeks after activating the tool, the company saw significant growth. Not only did it experience a 44% increase in comments, it also saw a 34% increase in average session length and a 38% increase in total on-site engagement

“This feature is a new way for publishers to start increasing the participation of their active community members, which in turn boosts the time spent on their sites,” Dan Seaman, product director of engagement tools at Viafoura. 

The recirculation feature can also live anywhere on your site. Consider adding it below our Conversations tool, within a notifications bar or on the side rail of your homepage. Curious about what the tool looks like? Take a peek at it in action below:

Want to learn more about the tool? Ask us your questions or book a live demo of our recirculation here

RELATED: Viafoura Launches a Rapid Moderation Console for Media Organizations

Audience Engagement Data is About to Amp up Sports Media

Just last week, Adam Hodgkins, the senior business development manager at Genius Sports Media, published an insightful article that dug into why audience engagement data on-site is the key to growing revenue in sports. And we couldn’t agree more.

“There’s an awareness in the OTT space that sports companies have lost control of their audiences to social media,” says Michael Shewchenko, Head of Business Development for Sports and Media at Viafoura. “But they now have an opportunity to engage their audiences on their properties in a positive and highly valuable way, and use their own data to put a name and a face to their users.”

Audience engagement data is the money-making factor that many sports companies are missing out on. Any sports company that wants to significantly boost revenue would, therefore, benefit greatly from connecting with their audiences, learning who their community members are, and then using that information to create and send highly relevant content and ads.

Unlocking a Premium Experience for Sports Fans

To connect with audiences on a more direct level, sports companies need to turn their digital properties into engaging communities through super-exclusive spaces that capture valuable insights on users. This can be accomplished through ‘premium experiences’ that can be offered to encourage users to register or subscribe.

“Engagement tools can open up the premium experience,” says Shewchenko. “Tools that encourage on-site interaction increase the likelihood of passive sports consumers becoming active and highly engaged users. It’s all about building the two-way communication between users and brands.”

A premium experience can include anything from participating in live chats, real-time commenting and blogging to following favorite teams, players, authors, topics or getting regular updates.

In his article, Hodgkins explains that unique behind the scenes footage, exclusive interviews and easy access to detailed statistics have handed sports leagues and teams a golden opportunity to turn their websites and social channels into valuable destinations for information-hungry fans.”

Techcrunch even conducted a recent survey, which found that 78% of industry experts believe that fan engagement tech will have the largest impact on live streaming and esports in the next year.

Sports fans are already excited about players and upcoming events they’re practically itching to interact with one another and around related content. The more opportunities you give them to engage on your platform, the more data you’ll be able to gather on who they are and what kinds of content and experiences they like.

Not only can sports companies sell this consumer data to advertisers, but “by knowing that their audience are, say, mostly men aged between 18 and 25 who read about basketball on a daily basis, advertisers have a huge strategic advantage when choosing where to spend their budget,” says Hodgkins.

Targeting Content to Known Users

As sports companies learn who their audience members are and how they react to different types of content, they can create content and experiences that delight their communities. For instance, knowing which player is your community’s favorite can help you generate extremely high-performing, related content that your audience will devour and generate conversations around. Plus, the more engaging and relevant your platform is, the more likely your community is to grow.

By serving up a premium experience to fans, sports media is able to capture meaningful data, which can significantly improve conversion strategies, grow revenue and increase consumer loyalty.

Stop relying on third-party news aggregators and social media platforms to run your ads off of, and instead, become the primary destination for consumers.

Get to know your fans on your own properties. Give them the content and experiences they love. Then use their data to inform business strategies and grow revenue. It really is as simple as that.

 

Related: What We Can Learn From Pirate Sites
RELATED: Build Your Community of Sports Fans Now
RELATED: 13 Questions Every Publisher Should Ask a Potential Tech Partner

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.

Viafoura Launches a Rapid Moderation Console for Media Organizations

The Moderation Tool Built by Moderators, for Moderators

Toronto, Ontario, October 1, 2019 Viafoura’s rapid Moderation Console is now available to media companies worldwide, and acts as a productivity tool for moderators. The Console offers media organizations a new approach to organizing and accelerating the way their moderators work.

“Our goal was to streamline moderation workflows and ensure the process is cost-effective for our clients,” says Viafoura’s founder and CEO, Jesse Moeinifar. “We built this product from the ground up to centralize content moderation across multiple digital properties, leveraging the expertise of actual moderators.”

Viafoura’s revamped tool can now successfully increase moderation velocity and accuracy through a variety of features:

  • Queues — Moderators can work from a single queue of user-generated posts from multiple digital properties, moderate comments in bulk, ban users and review relevant user data. This includes the number of each user’s bans and blocked posts. 
  • Custom Workspaces Allows moderators to perform all their responsibilities from one centralized location. Workspaces can also be created and assigned to specific users based on predefined criteria such as shift times, helping to optimize resource allocation.
  • Saved Searches — For discovery and training purposes, moderators can search through past comments in real time using advanced filters. 
  • Tags — Moderators can use a predefined list of tags explaining why a post was blocked to improve reporting on the Console’s analytic dashboard. 
  • Easy Integration — The Moderation Console’s open API can be easily integrated with almost every third-party commenting platform.

“Our moderation tool allows moderators to be flexible,” says Leigh Adams, product manager of Viafoura’s moderation services. “It’s sophisticated, customizable and can set up the environment for moderators based on their knowledge of a community.”

Mehrad Karamlou, a product manager at Viafoura, states that “civility is fundamental to building loyal communities. We intend to help publishers keep their properties free of incivility, including hate speech and vulgarity, which can spike during major events like national elections and the Olympics.”

The Moderation Console is also included with the purchase of any Viafoura tool. For more information, book a demo or contact your client success representative.

About Viafoura
Viafoura helps over 600 media, broadcast and entertainment brands better build, manage and monetize their content, audience and data in real time, powering more than 1.5 billion interactions across 350 million active users. Through a mix of AI, user-to-user and human moderation across a variety of community engagement tools, Viafoura helps you create a trusted, digital environment that readers will feel comfortable in and, therefore, want to return to. The Viafoura community-building solution includes user registration and profile management, protected commenting, live chat, live blogging, ratings and reviews and data insights.

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Media Contact: Rebecca Alter, Marketing Specialist
Organization: Viafoura
Phone Number: 647-904-9990
Email: rebecca@viafoura.com

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