Category: Blog

Viafoura helps empower Graham Media Group Online Communities

Graham Media Group implements the Viafoura Viafoura Engagement Cloud across its seven digital properties to uphold its commitment to celebrating local communities and giving voice to the stories that matter.

“Viafoura is a much needed and welcomed enhancement to Graham Media Group, improving the user experience and increasing audience engagement across our sites,” said Jon Beard, Director of Digital Product Development.

"Having a single platform to support all our audience development needs is a key strength to empowering our newsrooms and unique local communities.”
— Jon Beard, Director of Digital Product Development

Graham Media empowers enables on-site interactions with a frictionless user registration, an easy-to-use content share bar, and real-time commenting across its websites. Viafoura’s engagement tools further allow users to create a personalized experience and receive real-time notifications for breaking news, social activity, and new followers.

Benefits to Graham Media’s new capabilities include:

Graham Media’s moderation efforts are drastically improved with Viafoura Automated Moderation. It provides 24/7 real-time moderation using natural language processing and machine learning to detect, flag, and eliminate spam and abusive comments before they are seen by online audiences. These algorithms ensure Graham Media’s community guidelines are upheld to the utmost precision across its seven digital properties. Jon Beard confirms, “We’re able to focus on participating in the conversation and rewarding positive discussions across our websites.”

Connect with us today to learn how Viafoura can help you build, manage and monetize your audience.

Your Comment Section, Your Ads, Your Revenue

There’s one question that we often hear: “Do you offer a revenue-share for ads that display within your commenting platform?”

The answer is simple, we don’t. We believe your high-value real estate and customer experience should be driven by you and within your control.

Viafoura Real-Time Commenting now provides the same ad positions in and around our commenting widget, but empowers media organizations to use their own ad units and inventory, without taking a cut from your revenue.

And if a no-ad experience is a part of your value proposition for subscribers, the no-ad experience is upheld across your site, not just above the fold.

The Case for Ads in the Comment Section

Having the capability to place your own ads in the commenting section opens up more inventory to your sales team, removes the middleman, and gives you better control over what ads get displayed in your content. It empowers you to monetize your audience directly rather than being an intermediary between you and an ad network outside of your control.

And with real-time audience insights, you can predict high-potential content in advance to manage advertising decisions.

Engaged Audiences Yield Higher Profits

You’ll also be reaching highly-engaged audiences with your ads if you’ve taken advantage of Viafoura engagement tools like real-time commenting and notifications. Not to mention that a subscriber generates more profits than a non-subscriber exposed to ads – so it’s necessary to consider engagement tools in tandem with your ads to increase the chance that users become subscribers.

The Case is Clear: You Win When Your Ads Win

Generating ad impressions through your own ad units not only empowers you to maximize yield, but also to have control over what ads appear, and how best to monetize the relationship with your audience.

So what are you waiting for? If you’re looking to drive direct and indirect revenue around your brand, content, and community, let’s connect.

Related: The Value of a Registered User

Interested in learning more?

Connect with us today to learn how Viafoura can help you build, manage and monetize your audience.

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Engaging News Project: What Audiences Want from Comments

In a recent survey by the Engaging News Project, over 12,000 commenters from 20 different news sites opened up about their commenting behavior and preferences. To make the comment section work for you, we’re summarizing their key findings and showing how Viafoura stacks up.

In this report, the Engaging News Project found most commenters who read and weigh-in on news stories online want journalists and “experts” to get involved in the comments. Their preferences were fairly consistent across news sites.

On average, 81% of commenters said they’d want journalists to clarify factual questions.

In addition, an average of 73% of respondents said they’d want “experts” on topics covered in a news article to respond to comments.

Finally, 58% said they’d want journalists to actively contribute to comment sections and 42% said they’d want journalists to highlight quality comments.

Other noteworthy findings from the Engaging News Project:

Related: 5 Ways to Decrease Trolling and Improve the Quality of Your Comments

  • Although an available option on most news sites, only 62% of commenters think it’s possible to report offensive comments.
  • How often an individual engages in the comments relates to how much civility they perceive in the comment section. In other words, if the comment section is seen to be civil, individuals are more inclined to engage in it.
  • Perceptions of civility in the new comment sections vary per site. Between 14%-78% of respondents per site rate the comments as “very or somewhat civil.”
  • Fewer than half of respondents on any news site feel connected to other commenters (This ranges from 13-42%). The more comments they posted, the more connected they felt.
  • Most commenters across all sites find comment sections easy to navigate. Yet, just under half said that it is easy to sort the comments.

Clearly, there’s a desire from commenters to engage with journalists and “experts” in the comment sections and for news sites to provide a sense of community.

While engaging in the comments can often be a daunting task for journalists and there isn’t always enough time in the day to contribute to the conversation, there are tools and tactics you can leverage to facilitate reader and journalist interactions, create a loyal online community, and encourage visitors to return more frequently and spend more time on your site:

Increase Opportunities for On-site Interactions

Viafoura provides all the tools and opportunities to create connections throughout the user journey with personalized user profiles, follow features, social sharing, real-time commenting, and notifications feeds.

Build Relationships with Commenters

Our commenting module makes it possible for users to engage in real-time with other users and journalists. Users can also sort comments by editor’s picks, by most recent or most active, or flag a comment with just one click.  And editors and journalists can set flagging thresholds by article and and promote chosen comments at the article level and site-wide with ease. You can also reward your quality contributors with trusted user badges to further incentivize quality comments.

Drive Engagement and Return Visits

Increase the value of on-site engagement with real-time commenting and notifications. With our browser-based push notifications and on-site notification feed readers are notified when they receive a real-time reply in the comment section. And with “Follow” features, users can follow other users and a journalist’s user profile to keep up with their latest articles and on-site activity.

Increase Civility in the Comment Sections

Eliminate harassment, abuse, hate speech, and spam in real-time with algorithms built on natural language processing and machine learning to uphold your community guidelines on your site and social channels. Manage multiple news sites with ease and uphold moderation efforts in real-time while maintaining thresholds of civility within each community.

We further support civility with enhanced community and user management features including email verification, display name and avatar moderation, user-to-user muting, and timed user banning, which results in significant increases in participation in the comments section and time-spent.

It’s OK to Disagree

The dislike button provides a way for disagreement without the alert of a flag and significantly reduces actions required from the newsroom when added to the comment module. We’re seeing great results with our customers reporting a 50% reduction in flagging in as little as two weeks since their implementation.

We also empower your community to create a personalized experience with the ability to mute other users, removing the muted user from their online experience site-wide. Nothing lasts forever, so if a user changes their mind they can easily unmute users within their notification tray.

Own and Access your First-Party Data

Can you quantify the impact of engagement on user registration, attention time, and other important KPIs? With access to your first-party data and rich audience insights, you can discover new opportunities to increase audience engagement and drive on-site interactions with your content and brand at the center of it all.

With the people, process, and technology in place, you’re well on your way to building a direct relationship with your audience and growing your on-site community.

Free Webinar on Demand

For more on creating a respectful exchange of ideas in the comments, watch our on demand webinar — More Than a Comment: How CBC Drives Real Conversations Below the Fold.

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Browser-Based Push Notifications: A New Channel

It’s very powerful. It could become bigger than email. There’s no spam traps; it goes exactly to the people who signed up for it. You could move hundreds of thousands of people a day to a piece of content.”
— Joe Speiser

Many media organizations have used app-based push notifications, but few have discovered the potential of browser-based push notifications.

Real-time push notifications are not competing with email but enable you to enter into the space of personal forms of communication, effectively competing with SMS and other personal alerts.

Entrepreneur Ariel Seidman captures this well: Now that you can reach users through the browser on desktop and mobile, media organizations “can tap almost two billion people on the shoulder.”

And the timeliness and attention required for a push notification is completely different than an email newsletter or digest that readers may not read for a couple of days.

“It’s very powerful,” confirms Joe Speiser, Co-Founder and CEO of LittleThings. “It could become bigger than email. There’s no spam traps; it goes exactly to the people who signed up for it. You could move hundreds of thousands of people a day to a piece of content.”

Browser-based push notifications drive more return visits

They prompt people to engage more with a news organization by returning to an app or website. And the data confirms people who receive push notifications return more than those who do not receive notifications.

In a recent study, The Engaging News Project found more than 56% of respondents who receive push notifications said they went to the news organization’s website.

The Washington Post launched Chrome notifications in September, reporting 200,000 signups, which amounts to a 10% opt-in rate and a 30% click-through rate.

Media organizations can communicate 1:1 with their readers through this new channel and shape the kinds of discussions they want to have around their content. “The more time we put into these direct channels, the more people are opting in,” confirms Anthony Sessa, VP of Product & Engineering, Mic. “It’s our feed. We get to control that feed and it’s not a black box like the Facebook algorithm. We can drive the conversation the way we want at the time we want.”

Providing readers with the effortless option to receive personalized alerts ensures they will receive breaking news or targeted content even when they are not on site. With the ability to reach your audience directly, you can take an active approach to driving traffic, and increasing click-throughs, and time-spent on site.

Free Webinar on Demand

Focused on growing your online community? Looking to grow and monetize your audience? Watch our webinar: Best Practices for Developing your Onsite Community.

Watch Now
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