Category: Blog

Viafoura Launches New Audience Engagement Suite to Power Live Story Coverage and Real-time Conversations for Media Companies

Viafoura – a leading provider of engagement cloud solutions specifically built for news publishers and media companies – today announced the launch of Conversations.

Toronto, August 2, 2018: Viafoura – a leading provider of engagement cloud solutions specifically built for news publishers and media companies – today announced the launch of Conversations. Building on their leading real-time commenting platform, Viafoura Conversations provides, a complete set of real-time tools and capabilities to help media companies and journalists connect with their audience directly on their site and mobile applications. Backed by a leading AI moderation solution, journalists and audiences alike, are free of the worry of trolls and hate speech and can participate in real-time conversations not only in the comments, but in live chat forums and as part of the live blogging experience, now provided by the Viafoura Conversation suite.

“The audience experience, interactions and resulting first party data belong in the hands of the content creators and at Viafoura, we are committed to ensuring that happens in fully automated moderation environments free of hate speech, harassment and abuse.”
— Jesse Moneifar, CEO, Viafoura

Viafoura Conversations provides media companies with the tools they need to offer live story coverage and enable real-time conversations through commenting, live chat and more –all directly on their sites. Highlights of the suite, part of the market-leading Viafoura Engagement Cloud, include:

Live Stories

Enable real-time coverage of stories and events by publishing a live stream of content directly on site and include external links and embedded social posts with ease. Live Stories lets journalists cover stories as they happen and ensures users stay up to date on breaking news and can join the conversation in real-time.

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Viafoura Live Stories - Rich Text Capabilities

Live Chat

Provide registered users and subscribers a forum to connect around topics and events directly on your site with the real-time protection of Viafoura Automated Moderation.

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Real-Time Commenting

Enhances audience engagement by allowing real-time conversations to unfold directly on site, creating a highly engaged community of authors, readers, influencers and subscribers that’s backed by Viafoura Automated Moderation to guarantee brand safety.

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Viafoura Real-Time Commenting

Ratings & Reviews

Offers a five-star system that lets users react to the experiences, places and products they encounter.

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Viafoura Ratings & Reviews

All Viafoura Conversations products come with a guaranteed uptime of 99.95% and native ads-in-comments functionality.

“Leading media brands understand the importance of connecting directly with their audience and looking for tools that make it easy for journalists to provide live story coverage and interact with their audience in a safe environment.”
— Allison Munro, Head of Sales and Marketing, Viafoura

“And with the many challenges on social platforms, from algorithm changes to user data breach and scandals, to fake news, trolls and harassment, it’s important now, more than ever that media companies can control their user experience and build their audience relationship on their owned channels.” Munro, continues.

The Viafoura Engagement Cloud is used by over 600 media brands globally, including CBC, Advance Media, Graham Media, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Irish Times, and The Weather Network.

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.

Growing Trust Through Audience Engagement

Trust. In today’s media environment, it’s the cornerstone to growing a loyal community of registered users and paid subscribers.

Users today crave a direct relationship at the source of information, with a brand that provides a safe environment where they can connect and consume information. More and more, users are willing to pay for exactly that, while advertisers are also making it a priority.

But – in an age of “fake news,” data breach scandals, and information overload propelled by social media – site visitors will only become registered users and paid subscribers with brands that they trust. And building that trust means changing up the traditional revenue models a lot of online publishers rely on.

So how do you create enough trust to convert anonymous users into registered subscribers? Then how do you keep it?

“Trust is one of the most discussed topics in Western media at the moment, mainly because there is none.”
—Peter Houston

Trust begins with data handling, privacy policies and regulations

Trust is a driving issue throughout the web today. Social media sites like Facebook have already faced public scrutiny for how they handle the privacy of their users’ data, gaining disfavor after allowing third parties to access users’ personal information for both commercial and political gains. When Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to testify before US government officials over the Cambridge Analytica data breach it became clear he’d broken the public’s trust.

And publishers and content producers are just as accountable to their audiences. Those based in the European Union, or who are targeting or monitoring the behavior of audiences in the EU, are also accountable to European regulators. With the newly implemented GDPR regulations, media companies now have a fiduciary responsibility to uphold these laws when engaging with European audiences, and must remain transparent in how personal information data is collected and handled through privacy policies, or face harsh financial penalties. This is a new precedent impacting the web globally, with more countries expected to follow suit.

Whether forced through regulation or the threat of a tarnished public image, online publishers have to earn trust to gain loyalty. And to earn a registered user means providing the details of how their personal information is shared, stored, tracked and deleted.

Engagement builds a sense of belonging

Trust is multi-faceted, though, and the right data policy is only the first step. Advertisers, journalists and loyal community members also want a safe environment where healthy and productive discussions can take place, and where they can get to know your community and develop that trust naturally.

When your writers and journalists participate in the online commenting section, community engagement goes up. With so much time and money being spent on discovery, enabling your audience to connect with both your content and writers through real-time conversations goes a long way in building a loyal relationship with users. Providing author engagement to drive loyalty and trust with your audience keeps them returning and spending more time on your site.

But also ensure that the community you offer is a safe one. Upholding community guidelines in real time with automated moderation can save community members and writers from personal attacks, hate speech and harassment, creating a positive user experience they can all trust. Community management standards can be maintained automatically through moderation technology that will protect your brand and audience from malicious behavior, while auto moderation also offers internal efficiencies so newsrooms no longer have to invest time managing the comments section but can instead focus on high-quality engagement and reporting.

Monetization begins with loyalty

The value of trust and brand loyalty goes beyond just audience engagement, too. In today’s world of big data and robust analytics, advertiser expectations are more sophisticated than ever, and monetization itself relies on users’ relationship with your site.

It’s no longer enough to just get clicks on a page – especially with click-bait and bots inflating those numbers. Instead, advertisers want to see growth in brand loyalty before partnering with publishers. For proof of that, they want and expect to see assurance metrics that prove that audiences are loyal enough to stick around long enough to consume their content. And not only do they want to see engaged users, they need to see brand safety standards in place that will support partnering with the publisher representing their brand.

Advertising isn’t the only monetization model that benefits from trust, either. There is a shift in the publishing world that goes back to the original roots of monetizing the relationship with an audience through paid subscriptions. Today, that takes form through the incorporation of paywalls and a new focus on reader revenue.

Audiences seek out coverage from trusted sources that allows them to actively participate and engage in the conversation as it unfolds – and they’re often willing to pay for that. By offering a seamless personalized user experience, introducing low page-load times and focusing on UX design, media companies can grow audience loyalty through engagement by offering user-centric features that help maintain that relationship. By engaging your users through content and personalized features, you can keep loyal registered users coming back.

Loyalty and trust go hand and hand

Attaining trust and driving a user to become a registered subscriber requires a value exchange between the online publisher and the reader. By giving your community different ways to consume content and interact directly on their trusted channel of choice – your media site – you power that exchange and encourage loyalty and revenue.

By offering protection for users to safely engage while delivering a personalized brand experience, media companies can grow their audiences by developing trust – converting unknown visitors into registered users, and maintaining that trust through the loyalty of a subscriber.

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

With the prevalence of online trolls, some organizations have put up their hands and given up on the comment section. But doing so, even temporarily, has major drawbacks for organizations…

Last updated October 28th, 2019

Highlights:

  1. Reward users to encourage desired conversations
  2. Offer moderation tools to your users
  3. Use artificial intelligence in conjunction with your human efforts
  4. Quiz your users to weed out those who haven’t read the full story
  5. Stop anonymous comments

With the prevalence of online trolls, some organizations have put up their hands and given up on the comment section altogether. But doing so, even temporarily, has major drawbacks for organizations and their users.

As Carrie Lysenko — Head of Digital for The Weather Network — pointed out in an RTNDA Canada panel on engagement, turning off comments can result in a significant drop in pageviews and attention time. This echoes Viafoura’s own findings that brands with commenting can increase pageviews by 248% and attention time by 364%. This increased engagement leads to higher registrations and subscriptions since engaged users are more likely to pay for premium services.

And while managing online communities has traditionally been cumbersome and expensive, today there are many cost-effective ways to reduce or eliminate trolling. For media companies, these new tools allow you to not only keep your comment section open, but also to capitalize on your user-generated content.

Reward Users to Promote Civil Comments

Trusted-user badge

Encourage users to submit thoughtful comments by rewarding your best commenters with a trusted-user badge. With this status, an icon will appear beside the user’s name for others to see. These trusted users are also able to publish their comments in real time without being moderated.

Editor’s pick

Another way to reward users is by giving their comment the editor’s pick status. These comments can be featured in prominent positions on your website to model the types of comments you want to receive.

This is also beneficial for SEO, because comments that are placed higher on your webpage will get indexed by Google, and the keywords in those comments may be a closer match to users’ own search terms than those used by a journalist.

Create articles from users’ comments

Many organizations today — including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) — are creating stories entirely from their users’ comments. These stories not only reward commenters for their insightful posts, but are cost-effective, quick to publish and receive a surprisingly high amount of attention time and comments. Some even attract more comments than the original piece from which they were taken.

To see the impact of these articles, we tracked the number of comments for eight user-generated blog posts in CBC’s Revenge of the Comment Section, comparing those to the number of comments for their original articles.

The results are depicted in the chart below:

It’s significant to note that while almost all of the original stories received more comments, the user-generated articles often weren’t far behind. And in one instance, for Story 2, there were more comments for the user-generated article (601,000) than for its original article (343,000). Readers also spent approximately 2.3x more time on the former page.

That’s pretty fascinating since these articles can be created at a fraction of the time and cost it takes a journalist to create a new article from scratch.

Offer Content Moderation Tools to Your Users and Managers

Flagging

Allow users to easily flag comments that they find offensive, using a noticeable red flag icon. When a comment receives a predetermined amount of flags, it will enter a queue for review with a moderator who will decide the appropriate action.

Timed user banning

Give short “timeouts” — as little as a few hours, days or months — and notify users as to why they are being banned to help them improve the quality of their comments. Alternatively, users can be permanently banned for repeated offenses.

Dislike button

The dislike button allows users to express their dislike for a comment, without having to flag it (which requires a moderator’s time and resources). We found that this button can reduce flagging by 50% in as little as two weeks upon implementation.

Gamification

Both The New York Times and The Guardian have created games that allow readers to try moderating content. Users are tasked with approving or rejecting comments and providing reasoning for their decisions. This is not only enjoyable for users, but eases some of the burden on moderators.

Use AI Moderation to Eliminate Online Harassment

Whether your organization employs dedicated moderators or tasks other employees with removing the “trash,” you could be saving countless hours and dollars with automated moderation.

Automated moderation uses natural-language processing and artificial intelligence to automatically categorize and eliminate trolling, spam and online harassment.

Viafoura’s Automated Moderation is programmed with over six million variations of problematic words or phrases. This means that it’s able to determine both the subject matter and the sentiment behind users’ comments, detecting and eliminating spam, foul language, abuse, personal attacks and other uncivil comments before other users can even see them.

If the system encounters a new word or sentence that it’s unsure of, it flags the instance for a moderator to review. As a moderator approves or rejects new words, through the power of machine learning, the algorithm will learn the new rules and get smarter over time.

On average, our studies have found that automated moderation has a higher accuracy rate (92%) than human moderation (81%), and reduces 90% of the time and cost it takes to moderate a community manually.

Quiz Your Users

The Norwegian tech news website, NRKbeta, encourages thoughtful comments by asking their readers to prove they read the whole story by taking a quiz. Their organization believes that this quiz can weed out users who haven’t read the story, while also giving users time to reflect on how they will comment instead of just typing a response to a shocking headline.

Their reporter, Stale Grut, comments, “When a lot of journalists hit ‘publish’ I think that they see themselves finished with a story. But we see that you’re only halfway through with the article when you’ve published it.” Their goal is to improve articles through collaboration.

Many commenters agreed that this tactic would promote insightful comments. Here’s what they had to say:

“It WILL raise the discourse, and it will improve the journalism too. And why should some poor intern have to sit and delete all the trash? Let a computer do it.”
—Moira

“I would not object to that if it reduced the uninformed and off-topic as well as useless comments”
—Annette

End Anonymous Commenting

By allowing users to register for your website through one of their social media accounts, with the use of social login, they are less likely to post harassing comments because they can easily be identified.

The social login button also generally increases conversion rates by 20% to 40%, while giving you access to user information that can be used to create targeted messaging.

Increased Engagement = Higher Revenue

If you’re committed to improving the quality of interactions on your website, you may find that using moderators alone can be expensive and time-consuming. Luckily, today we can count on technology to encourage quality comments and eliminate the number of personal attacks. And by improving the quality of interactions on your site, you can look forward to increased engagement, improved brand loyalty and enhanced lifetime value from your users.

Need more help?

If you’re looking to drive engagement and leverage user-generated content, let’s connect.

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Top Eight Best Practices to Setting Effective Community Guidelines

For media companies, comment sections offer users a place to participate and engage with your journalists and each other. However, comment sections can easily turn toxic without moderation tools in place to rein in spam and abuse…

Last updated October 28th, 2019

Highlights:

  • There are many tools out there to help with moderation
  • Remember to keep personal information, personal
  • Have an escalation plan
  • Set expectations with your users on your community guidelines and don’t be afraid to enforce them

For many organizations, opening up a comment section offers their users a place to participate and engage with content and one another. 

However, commenting sections can easily turn toxic. We found that 68% of audiences spend more than 15% of their time on-site reading comments. The more toxic the comments*, the less likely people are to engage with your content, turning away potential subscribers.

Keep your community guidelines easily visible to visitors!

There are a number of moderation tools and moderation services out there to rein in spam and abuse. When creating your own community guidelines, we recommend following these tried and true best practices for building a safe, productive community:

*At Viafoura, all our tools come with automated content moderation, creating a safe space for users to interact in.

 

Keep Your Users’ Personal Information Safe

With the proliferation of social media, one of the basic fundamentals of online safety — not giving out personal information — has been lost. Include emphasis in your community guidelines to stay safe online, and a reminder to your users not to post personal information about themselves or others. Make a mandate to eliminate any posts that include this information on their behalf.

Don’t F@!*% with the Law

This should go without saying, but your guidelines should make it clear that comments that appear legally objectionable or encourages/condones a criminal offense or any form of violence or harassment, will NOT be tolerated.*

*Note: If you do see something on your site that could potentially violate the law, make sure you have an escalation policy.

Proactively Whitelist and Blacklist Websites

Once your community has been commenting for a while, it’s easier to recognize sites to be safe or spam. Let users know that anything that looks/acts/quacks like spam will be removed and blacklisted.

This will save time in your moderation efforts by whitelisting the safe sites and blacklisting the spam.

Enforce Community Guidelines: Banning Users

Community guideline violations are and should be enforceable through user bans. Don’t make this an empty threat; ban users.

You could make a tiered system, with the first interaction resulting in a short ban and each following infraction resulting in a longer ban time. For example:

  • A first ban for serial flagging might be one hour.
  • The next ban for personal attacks could be one day. 
  • And the following ban for repetitive posting could be three days. 

Make sure the messaging accompanying the ban explains the violation, with a link to your guidelines for more information and a concrete amount of time before the user’s account reactivates. This ensures nothing gets lost in translation, sets expectations and provides additional resources for the banned user.

Delete Repetitive Posts

Similar to blacklisting sites that appear to be spam, comments that appear to be spam (i.e. repetitive posts) should be deleted. Automatically identify word-for-word posts, hide them from view, then choose whether or not you would like to ban the user for a preset amount of time.

Abuse Is More Than Name-Calling

Users can abuse each other and the platform by more than just calling each other names within the comments themselves. One example of this is serial flagging: when one user flags another user’s content as a violation when it is clearly not. If serial flagging is a violation on your site, you may choose to ban users when more than 50% of the content they flag does not violate community guidelines. Leverage a user’s historical information to make a judgment call.

Make Unacceptable Content Crystal Clear

Sometimes we have a concept of what is or isn’t allowed in comment content. But creating a clear, unassailable description in your community guidelines can help prevent initial violations and give your moderators a reference point that clearly defines unacceptable content. Examples of content to explicitly define as unacceptable include:

  • Personal attacks
  • Vulgar or obscene content
  • Libelous or defamatory statements
  • Anything that can be described as threatening, abusive, pornographic, profane, indecent or otherwise objectionable

You Reserve the Right to Review and Moderate all Comment Content

Ultimately, you are in control of your online community. Remind users in your community guidelines that you reserve the right to remove or edit comments and permanently block any user in violation of your terms and conditions. This umbrella statement gives you complete control over the content your community produces, guaranteeing discourse will remain positive and productive.

Click here for more information on Viafoura Content Moderation, which provides you with all the tools you need to ensure conversations remain civil in even the largest online communities.

Related: Why Attention Time Matters

Interested in learning more about content moderation?

Contact us today to learn how Viafoura Automated Moderation is empowering media companies to manage their communities in real-time.

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How Audience Engagement Tools Impact Revenue

Engaged users increase your pageviews, time on site, and ultimately, revenue. But what is an engaged user exactly? Simply put, it’s a website visitor who…

Last updated June 14th, 2018

Engaged users increase your pageviews, time on site, and ultimately, revenue.

But what is an engaged user exactly?

Simply put, it’s a website visitor who is actively involved with or interested in your brand. In a study led by researchers from Google and Yahoo, they categorized user engagement in four ways:

  • Bounce: user did not engage with the article and left within 10 seconds after arriving
  • Shallow engagement: user stays and reads 50% of the article
  • Deep engagement: user reads more that 50% of the article (means he had to scroll down which indicates commitment)
  • Complete engagement: user posts a comments or a reply on the article

We would define an “engaged user” as anyone who likes, dislikes, shares content or comments, posts a comment, replies to a comment, or follows content/authors/other users. The more actions they complete, the higher their engagement.

It’s also important to note that some actions are “worth” more, or signify higher engagement. For example, a user who posts a comment is more engaged than someone who simply likes content, because they are taking more time to provide a personal opinion. A user who follows an author, story, comment or other user is more engaged than someone who shares an article because they are proactively choosing to be informed and updated in real time, showing significant interest.

So how do you engage your users or encourage them to perform these actions?

Audience engagement tools increase social interactions

Audience engagement tools give users more opportunities to engage with your brand and other community members, much like social media.

Related: Why Attention Time Matters

Media brands and publishers using these types of tools can expect to see significant increases in comments, replies and likes. One such brand, Graham Media Group, saw the following results after implementing engagement tools across seven of their news sites:

59
Increase in total comments & replies
69
increase in total interactions
9
Increase in commentper user
26
Increase in repliesper user

We also found that users who visited pages with engagement tools produced a 248% lift in weekly pageviews per user and a 364% lift in time-spent on site per week.

Total Weekly Pageviews
Per User		 Total Weekly Attention Time
Per User
Did not view engagement tools 2.07 4.07 minutes
Viewed engagement tools 7.20 18.80 minutes
Lift
+248%
+364%

*From analyzing the data across 600+ media organizations

Additionally, across our network of 600 media brands, 80% of all user registrations occurred on pages with engagement tools. And users who register generate 5x more return visits per week compared to non-registered users.

Now we come to the final question: how do these KPIs impact revenue?

Increased ad revenue

Research from data scientists confirms that not only do pageviews per visit increase ad revenue, but so does session time per user, as depicted in the graphs below. It’s also evident that getting users beyond the first few pageviews or seconds offers exponential revenue potential.

You’ll notice that session time has a surprisingly similar positive correlation with revenue as pageviews. Increased attention time means that there is more time for the ads to load on the page, and there is also a greater chance that a user will see an ad and potentially click on it.

Increased subscription revenue

Researchers Zalmanson and Oestreicher-Singer found that a user’s willingness to pay for premium services is more strongly associated with their online social activity than their content consumption.

In other words, users who engage more with other community members and with content are likelier to subscribe. In order to raise engagement levels, Zalmanson and Oestreicher-Singer suggest content producers should invest in a platform that provides the social engagement tools necessary to encourage active participation.

Doing so can increase subscriptions significantly, as witnessed by a New England media company that saw digital subscriptions jumped by 410% over three years after implementing automated audience engagement and targeting tools. Additionally, by displaying relevant content to anonymous visitors, they were able to increase the number of registered users by 9%.

Interestingly, Zalmanson and Oestreicher-Singer also found that users are more likely to subscribe if they have connections with other subscribers. The more subscriber friends that users have, the likelier they are to pay for premium services. This is likely due to the psychological phenomenon of social proof or social influence, where people mimic the actions of others because they assume it’s the “correct” behavior. Knowing this, publishers may want to consider how they can highlight their subscribed users so that their followers or friends are aware of their purchase decision.

Conclusion

If you have the right audience engagement tools in place, your audience will return to your website organically and regularly. It’s also less expensive to encourage your current website visitors to engage than it is to purchase new eyeballs on an ongoing basis. Not only will you save on marketing and advertising costs, but you’ll also increase your pageviews, attention time, online interactions and – most importantly – your advertising and subscription revenues.

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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Viafoura Automated Moderation Changes the Game for Community Moderation

Don’t Sacrifice the Flowers for the Weeds Have you ever had the pleasure of digging through the comments that pollute the web? If you have…

Last updated June 14th, 2018

Don't sacrifice the flowers for the weeds

Have you ever had the pleasure of digging through the comments that pollute the web? If you have, then you are no stranger to the spam and hostility that overwhelm the comment boxes that are a huge effort for teams to manage.

While spamming and trolling are challenges faced by many organizations, top media companies and brands know that community is everything, and that it’s crucial to be able to listen to and engage with customers online in real time. Unfortunately, that means constantly sifting through the many hateful comments in order to nurture a healthy online community.

Community Growth

It’s not just frontline digital teams that want to foster a healthy online environment – it’s important to their audiences and customers as well. In fact, when the quality of conversations increases, so does their audience’s engagement.

35
Increase in comments per user
34
Increase in replies per user
62
Increase in likes per user
22
Increase in likes per comment

*Analyzed data gathered from 600+ media organizations, compiled both before and after the introduction of Viafoura Automated Moderation.

Cutting Through the Noise

With smart technologies like Viafoura Automated Moderation, content producers can manage, moderate and listen to their communities, with the protection of pre-moderation in real time.

Automated Moderation automatically eliminates up to 90% of the time and effort spent moderating communities, analyzing comments and responding to customers.

How does it work? Our team of linguists teamed up with our engineers to build an engine that automatically looks for patterns in language. It determines the topic, how the person felt when they wrote it, and also its context. They did this by programming every 6.5 million variation of each word in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French, with more on the horizon.

This engine is then used to moderate and listen across all owned and third-party social networks to manage engagement, provide insights into urgent customer complaints, and display data and insights in one dashboard. It immediately removes comments outside of your community guidelines and sends suspect comments to a queue for resolution in real time.
That means that community managers don’t need to spend their resources looking over each comment or manually monitoring social networks. When a moderator logs in, they can easily review what needs their attention, focusing quickly on issues that really matter. By cutting through the clutter and allowing the most important comments to get addressed in real time, it allows you to deliver the best customer experience.

Creating Meaningful Relationships

By flagging and removing inappropriate comments, Viafoura Automated Moderation allows authors, community managers and social media managers to spend their time addressing important inquiries quickly and creating meaningful conversations with their audiences.
And when your teams are empowered to engage with audiences in a timely and meaningful way, it leads to the best customer experience, higher engagement and ultimately a higher lifetime value for each customer.

Related: Top 8 Best Practices to Setting Effective Community Guidelines

Interested in learning more?

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

Connect Now

Quit Counting Clicks

In the early days, as print publications moved to the web, one of the key metrics companies and advertisers cared about was pageviews – how many sets of eyes …

Last updated June 14th, 2018

It’s no longer just about eyeballs.

In the early days, as print publications moved to the web, one of the key metrics companies and advertisers cared about was pageviews – how many sets of eyes scanned a page, even if only for a second or two. In doing so, they effectively took the same measurement tool used for print – reach, which was measured in part by circulation – and applied it to the digital landscape.

In the print model, media companies earn revenue from the reach they have in their distribution channels. Their reach allows them to sell advertisements that exist alongside readable content such as news stories. In digital, reach was translated into the number of pageviews – or clicks – that a piece of content achieves, a metric that helped drive advertising sales in digital media’s inception stage.

Except reach quickly became outdated in the digital world, as advertisers came to realize that the number of clicks an article receives doesn’t take into account how many people actually read or interacted with the content or advertisement. The rise of bots and clickbait has also artificially inflated the number of clicks some sites receive, leaving behind numbers that are basically meaningless.

With that in mind, a growing number of advertisers have turned their backs on pageviews as a way of determining where to spend their advertising dollars, instead prioritizing audience engagement over the breadth of audience reach. The best indicator of content quality isn’t how many people see it, they believe, but how much time those people actually spend with it.

The rise of bots and clickbait has also artificially inflated the number of clicks some sites receive, leaving behind numbers that are basically meaningless.

Today, engagement is what pays

This shift from media distribution to media consumption dramatically lowers revenue capacity and puts significant pressure on companies to deliver a compelling value proposition to advertisers.

Consider media organizations like The Financial Times and Say Media, both of which clearly understand the relevance of engaged time and have placed it at the center of their value proposition to advertisers and users. Like a growing number of websites, they are showing they understand that just boosting traffic isn’t enough. Not all traffic converts.

As a user becomes increasingly engaged, they become more willing to pay for a digital media organization’s content or services. The MIT Sloan Management Review report, Turning Content Viewers Into Subscribers, asserts that engagement is the key to turning casual readers into paying subscribers, using a ladder model to frame how companies can boost engagement over time. Using what the research dubs the “Ladder of Participation,” you can prompt site users to progressively accelerate their onsite engagement to become paying subscribers.

Related: The Value of a Registered User

Implementing an engagement model promotes readers to return, register and subscribe – all of which is good for your bottom line. But engagement is driven by a commitment to identifying who your audience is and giving them what they want, when they want it – not just by spraying and praying on social media, which is the path chosen by many media companies today.

In fact, social media is being used by many media organizations as a way to solve their digital publishing dilemma of increasing engagement with their community, website, brand and content creators. But this means media organizations are handing over a huge opportunity to platforms that have their own business goals.

Social media sites are looking to solve their own audience development challenges, by creating interactions with their brand, community and content – interactions that often overlap very little with media organizations’ engagement goals. Facebook’s recent change to its algorithm is just one example of this, placing greater priority on posts from family and friends than on news feeds and content from companies. The social media giant acknowledged this when it announced the change, saying that “this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some pages.”

Get the most out of your audience engagement

The solution comes down to owning your engagement platform, in order to take full advantage of your audience and drive engagement to meet your business goals. When media organizations commit to engagement and take ownership of their channels, instead of relying heavily on social media sites that have their own agendas, they can focus their efforts on increasing and owning their audience’s interactions, connections and relationships.

With Viafoura, you can grow your audience and increase revenue using your own customized solution. This is the first step in moving past counting clicks, to a process and platform that is specifically built to work in today’s engagement-driven digital world.

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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Jesse Moeinifar

Founder & CEO
Jesse Moeinifar

Founder & CEO of Viafoura, is a serial entrepreneur with multiple successes spanning a range of industries, including real estate, digital media and software. Dedicated to disruption, Jesse is passionate about game-changing ideas and credits his accomplishments to assembling teams of smart individuals committed to solving challenging problems.

Pelmorex Corp. Calls on Viafoura to Help Expand Active Community Membership By Over 50 Percent

Toronto, May 18, 2018: Hoping to cement their position as the online destination for weather and weather-related news, Pelmorex started looking for new ways to build their audience and create a more active and engaged community around their content on the weathernetwork.com and MétéoMédia. To do so, they wanted to build added value for their audience by giving users a chance to connect more frequently on their platforms, in a localized, safe and real-time way. Pelmorex wanted to create new opportunities for engagement with the right technology solution and chose to partner with Viafoura.

“We are so pleased that we have been able to partner with Pelmorex Corp and truly make an impact on their audience engagement objectives: enhancing community standards, increasing registrations and driving user engagement.”
—Allison Munro, Head of Sales & Marketing, Viafoura

With the help of Viafoura Engagement Cloud, audience engagement and moderation tools, Pelmorex Corp. has been able to meet and exceed its original goals, creating a value exchange to drive user registration, enhancing guidelines with automated checks and balances in place, building audience loyalty, and increasing engagement to an all-time high within their community.

“We will continue to focus on growing our digital community to improve engagement on the websites and apps. This includes investing with Viafoura and expanding the suite of features offered by the platform.”
— Pamela Gonzales, Manager, Global Web & Emerging Technologies, The Weather Network

“The community as a whole encourages user interactions and repeat visits, as well as content consumption. In terms of user engagement, we have found that compared to non-registered users, registered users visit 31.5% more pages per visit, and more significantly, visit our properties 233% more times per month” said Pamela Gonzales, Manager, Global Web & Emerging Technologies, The Weather Network.

Allison Munro, Viafoura’s Head of Sales and Marketing will be hosting a Q&A fireside chat with Pamela Gonzales, Manager, Global Web & Emerging Technologies, The Weather Network, as they discuss fostering a thriving digital community. Tune in to learn how The Weather Network is driving real-time audience engagement in a localized way.

Learn more in the upcoming Viafoura Talks webinar

The Weather Network—Growing Your Digital Audience

Watch the on-demand webinar now:

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