Tag: analytics

Are You Getting The Best Value Out Of Your Engagement Tools?

If you’ve invested in an audience engagement solution, you’re probably well aware of how important the data you collect from the platform will be for the future performance of your business. Insights into how your existing users engage with content and the community built around it allows you to optimise your strategy. An optimised content strategy means you’ll produce more content that should drive additional users to convert into loyal subscribers.

Making those strategic decisions requires the right platform so that you can collect those insights. You need a solution that helps you collect first-party data and analyse on-site user behaviour. With that data in hand, you can effectively maximise the 3Rs:

  1. Registrations
  2. Retention
  3. Revenue

So how do you ensure you’re getting the best value out of your engagement tools? Our latest infographic offers a helpful visual guide on what you need from your platform and how it can help achieve your overarching business goals.

The right audience engagement platform should provide strategic recommendations that you can use to help grow the nature of your business. The technology should help you answer the questions of how to grow registrations, retain existing users, and increase revenue as the end benefit for all of your hard work.

Your team should find daily value from their audience engagement platform. They should not only know how to use the platform, but they should also understand why there’s so much value to be gained from these solutions. You’ll know the platform is a success if your team:

  • Feels motivated to use the platform every day
  • Increases productivity across the entire spectrum of your business
  • Understands how each of the core features helps solve the underlying business needs
  • Has the desire to collaborate with other departments and gain the deepest understanding of user intent and behavioural insights

If answers to any of these questions are anything short of yes, it might be time to ask yourself a much harder question: do you have the right audience engagement solution? Remember that audience engagement is the first step towards monetisation and greater revenue for your business. Without a platform that can help you gain the necessary insights to make effective revenue-driven decisions, you will likely struggle to achieve those aspirational growth targets.

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

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

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

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

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

Tips to capitalize on Facebook’s trust deficit

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

Invest in your own platform

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

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

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

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

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

Give the people what they want

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nurture safe conversations, not toxic comments

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

Wrong.

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

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

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

Produce targeted, reliable content

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

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

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

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

The Age of the Cookie is Crumbling Giving Publishers a Huge Opportunity

Last Updated: February 13, 2020

There once was a time when the cookie was all-powerful, drastically changing the advertising and media industries. But the cookie’s time is passing, and publishers are in search of other tools to monetize their readers.

Even Chrome is now officially joining in on the cookie crackdown.

Starting February 17th of 2020, Chrome will require web developers to set tighter restrictions on cookies. More specifically, cookies must be defaulted to first-party access — the kind that collects a small amount of user information and stores it directly on the website that the user visits. Companies that use third-party cookies — the ones that follow you around, reporting to an often-anonymous home base that re-targets you with ads — will need to tweak their website code to restrict them to secure websites.

“Only cookies set as SameSite=None; Secure will be available in third-party contexts, provided they are being accessed from secure connections,” states Google on the Chromium Blog.

If developers fail to add the necessary code, or don’t have a secure website, their cookies will be deleted without hesitation by Google. In some cases, websites may even break if the proper cookie code isn’t added in.

Although this update won’t completely eliminate third-party cookies from Chrome yet, the company is limiting their use to secure websites and eventually plans to phase them out altogether by 2022.

While this change could bring about yet another period of dread and uncertainty for media companies, we think it actually marks an opportunity for publishers to reclaim authority as the shepherds of engaged audiences. All it takes is quality journalistic content and a connection with readers. Just like the good ol’ days.

How it Crumbled

Consider the events that led to the crumbling of the almighty cookie: Its fall from popularity started when Safari — often the most-used browser on North American mobile devices — began limiting third-party cookies. Firefox and Google followed suit, blocking more and more tracking with every product update.

End users benefit from this shift because being tracked across the internet feels creepy, so any step away from that is a good one. But while many online publishers currently rely on ads served using tracking data, the Great Cookie Shift will be a boon for them too.

Cookies have devalued the context of where a given ad appeared. Because cookies have been able to find someone anywhere it doesn’t always make sense for an advertiser to pay a premium to serve it on a site producing quality journalism. That has, in turn, disincentivized publishers from producing high-quality content in exchange for sheer volume.

But if third-party cookies are de-powered as a result of browser changes and ads can no longer easily heat-seek their way to a reader in any ol’ corner of the internet, advertisers will have to shift their approach to find the quality audience they seek.

Why Quality Matters More Than Ever

The selling of quality context is going to matter more and more and advertisers, agencies, trading desks and everyone in between will be thinking more about that. Instead of chasing the New York Times’ audience to cheaper third-party sites with retargeting, it will mean advertisers must simply advertise on the actual New York Times.

However, capitalizing on this opportunity will rely on engagement with audiences. 

As Martin Pietrzak, Viafoura’s VP of Marketing put it, “If you can no longer target anonymous, single-visit users, quality connections with audience members will need to be the focus. Converting anonymous users to registered users will be key, and the faster a publisher can do that, the better off they’ll be.”

”The big win is that publishers can profile their registered users on the server side, gathering rich behavioural data in a way that’s immune to cookie restrictions.

Dan SeamanDirector of Product

The big win, in this case, is that publishers can profile their registered users on the server side, gathering rich behavioural data (pages visited, dwell time, ads clicked etc.) in a way that’s immune to cookie restrictions. That behavioural information — matched with declarative demographic info — is valuable first-party data that publishers can offer to brands who advertise directly on site, or to exchanges who want inventory.

First-party data has always been incredibly valuable, and publishers could become the gold standard for that once again, Pietrzak added. 

Before the digital revolution, news organizations marshalled large audiences for advertisers, offering little data beyond the size of readership and overall demographics to help with content adjacency. At a time when cookies are giving way to privacy concerns, those same organizations are positioned to lead the pack again, this time rich with user behaviour information given willingly by an engaged audience.

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

Please note that this article was last updated on February 10, 2020. 

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

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

Or outside the country.

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

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

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

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

Paywall Innovator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patrick LogueDigital Editor, The Irish Times

Data-driven Community Building

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

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

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

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

Patrick LogueDigital Editor, The Irish Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

INMA 2019 Story: Why journalism should sell a service — not a product

If you want an insightful, well-researched perspective on the evolution of news media, Grzegorz Piechota is a good place to start.
A researcher at the University of Oxford and Harvard Business School, Piechota studies how technology forces change on established industries. He is the researcher-in-residence at INMA, served on the boards of major journalistic enterprises, and has spoken as a thought leader at WMEMC and WAN IFRA events the world over.
At the INMA World Congress of News Media in May, our own VP of Marketing, Martin Pietrzak, met with Piechota, who made the case that audience engagement and data-driven editorial can rebuild journalism’s place in society by presenting the reporter’s craft as a service to invest in —  rather than a product to sell.
Martin Pietrzak: You called your presentation at the INMA congress “Reader-first Newsrooms: From content factories to service providers.” How do you see the evolution of the news media business?
Grzegorz Piechota: When media switched from advertising-based revenue to consumer-based revenue, that transformation involved changing other parts of the business model as well, not only the revenue source. When you change who pays, you need to adjust your value proposition to the needs of that different payer. And then, of course, you also need to adjust your operating model to be able to deliver that value proposition.
[Publishers] were using one single product to get as many readers as possible so they could aggregate their attention and send it to advertisers — the primary customer. We were chasing reach. Now, we no longer want to sell our products to as many people as possible because we know it is impossible. Content has become a commodity. Instead, we need to sell to the people who are the most profitable. Suddenly, we need to segment our consumers based on, for example, their profitability, and adjust our products to the consumers that you want to reach.
Pietrzak: You said content is a free commodity, which stuck with me because I’m not sure every journalist would agree.
Piechota: Content is a commodity because it is available everywhere. The tools are free. Anyone who wants to spread any kind of message can do it. In capitalism, the market determines the value of content, which on Facebook, Google and other platforms is virtually free.
But the way we deliver news products today makes it possible to think about journalism not as a product, but as a service. Two articles about a certain news event can have the same value from the perspective of company economics, but one was provided by professionals that actually verified its information. So I’m not paying for the piece of information; I can find a free alternative, right? But I cannot find a free alternative from somebody professionally trained in verifying this information. If I actually want to make a better decision based on facts, I want somebody to actually verify the facts.

"The way we deliver news products today makes it possible to think about journalism not as a product, but as a service."

Grzegorz PiechotaResearcher-in-residence at INMA
Pietrzak: You mentioned managing this shift from selling a single product to selling a subscribable service requires deep audience development skills. What do publishers need to think about when developing these relationships?
Piechota: When you make decisions about your content output, you must also data mine which target groups would be interested in this content, because your business model is based on finding the most profitable customers and putting a price tag on your service for them. You have to ask if [your content] is the best fit for the segment that are actually willing to pay for it … Suddenly, the decisions about content become decisions about audiences.
Pietrzak: Is this not simply pandering… producing what people want versus what they need? You’ve raised a few of those questions showing tension between loyalty to citizens versus loyalty to “customers.”
Piechota: It’s about needs. If I want to develop part of an audience, do they need content for themselves, or do they believe in that content? The Guardian is famous for charging its users while making content available for free. How the hell does that work? They look for customers who actually want to sponsor content for other people. Its readers might think climate change is the most important problem in the world, but that most of the public doesn’t see it that way. So they want to help The Guardian develop this content to spread the message. On the other hand, I may subscribe to the Financial Times’ content to understand the market and be smarter than my competitors. These would be very different needs. But what is common is we believe that factual, verified information moves communities to make better choices.
Pietrzak: So we’re not talking about chasing big Google search trends, which we’ve seen newsrooms do a lot of in recent years.
Piechota: When you think about your audiences, the core of the service that you want to provide should be wanting audiences to stay with you. The idea that newsrooms needed to grow and maximize their reach made them focus on people who didn’t actually visit their sites. “Oh, no. On Google, people are looking for information about this singer, so we need to have a story about them.” But we’ve since realized that people who want to pay for news are people who actually already use the product. And if you want to make them pay, you need to make them use the product more. We want to focus on driving the frequency of visits, maybe the depth of visits. We want to maximize the time that they spend on a page.

"We want to focus on driving the frequency of visits, maybe the depth of visits. We want to maximize the time that they spend on a page."

Grzegorz PiechotaResearcher-in-residence at INMA
Pietrzak: This has had a huge impact on how we measure success in this business, hasn’t it?
Piechota: We’re shifting from measuring past profitability to future profitability. In the past, profitability was about measuring individual products. But now you need to look at the profitability of individual customers because some customers will be buying more products. And then, because you shift from a single sale to [ongoing] subscriptions, it means that you can plan for future revenue. You can actually, based on your data, predict the future profits from the customer relationships that you start.
Pietrzak: This is where average annual revenue per user (ARPU) comes in.
Piechota: Yes. This absolutely gives you new opportunities. Because when you know the value of your customer over the next three years, you can rethink costs of acquisition. You can think about spending more because you know that this customer will most likely not just give you $10. The right person might be worth $300. And that means that you can outspend your competitors on acquisition and use this revenue to actually improve your product.
Piechota’s newsroom is a changed newsroom — one that’s shifted from content production to audience development by providing a service to communities. Building trust through engagement, he says, will be key to future success.
Read more about how media companies can drive retention, loyalty and trust in our guide.

How The Philadelphia Inquirer is Building an Audience-First Newsroom

The Philadelphia Inquirer gave Kim Fox a big job: help transform it into an audience-first news organization.

Sure, lots of newspapers advertise themselves as community focused, but for the Inquirer it has to be more than a marketing tactic — it’s a public-benefit corporation owned by a nonprofit dedicated to “preserving local journalism.” Community engagement is its official mandate.

Serving a city of nearly 1.6 million but lacking the resources of an international news organization, the Inquirer has had to be tactical in its approach. Its success, so far, has come from focusing on a few community news fundamentals and putting a new kind of editor in the newsroom.

Fox, the Managing Editor of Audience and Innovation, saw big challenges in connecting with readers when she arrived in 2016 from Bloomberg.

Just one example: reporters were being doxxed by trolls in a comment section so toxic, the mayor had publicly called it out. That problem was solved with investment in Viafoura’s moderation and engagement tools. It was one step of many in a longer-term challenge: the paper’s 240 journalists needed to make community engagement part of their day-to-day.

The fact that “editor” is in Fox’s job title shows how the Inquirer decided to approach this: as something championed by journalists rather than imposed on them from the business side or the organization. “There was some debate whether this kind of job should live with the product team or in the Inquirer’s newsroom,” says Fox. “The newsroom was the right place to make sure journalists bought in.”

Armed With Information

To help reporters adopt the tools of audience engagement and keep this change rooted in editorial, Fox created three editor positions overseeing SEO, newsletters and analytics. She describes them as coaches and advocates for their respective engagement tools, but says they are primarily there to help make stories better, discoverable and more relevant to the community.

“I like to say we’re data informed, not data led,” Fox says. Their approach is more than just seeing what stories are most-read and doing more of the same. They try to contextualize audience data, including from their moderation and engagement tool, to find opportunities for new products and services.

The Inquirer’s new Curious Philly sub-brand is showing early promise on this front. It lets residents ask questions about the city through an automated online audience platform. Asking about a city’s curiosities is a familiar concept to anyone in local news, but Fox sees it as the first step in making the Inquirer the “listening post of Philadelphia.”

“I like to say we’re data informed — not data led.”

Kim FoxManaging Editor of Audience and Innovation, The Philadelphia Inquirer

“We’ve been really successful with Curious Philly, getting more than 2,000 questions in the last six months,” she says. And while there are plenty of questions about local quirks (“What happened to the Hunting Park carousel?”), it’s starting to encompass broader, complicated issues (“I feel like the rest of the country’s economy is recovering and Philadelphia’s isn’t”).

“Think of that as 2,000 story assignments directly from the community,” Fox says. They tend to outperform other news items in terms of pageviews in part because they remain relevant longer than a typical news hit.

“We’re able to bring them back for recirculation on our site and promotion on social over a longer period of time, and some have been able to get a steady drip of evergreen search referral.”

The Ongoing Conversation

The success of Curious Philly drove more community outreach through a handful of workshops wherein Fox’s team connected with diverse groups of non-subscribers. Those sessions spawned We The People, another online sub-brand that profiles interesting, everyday individuals around the city. It also performs well from a traffic perspective and earned its reporter, Stephanie Farr, a Keystone Press Award in April.

The focus on community engagement is paying off. Online subscriptions have grown past benchmarks during Fox’s tenure, and she says the Inquirer has “some of the top retention rates for the industry at the metro level,” though she’s keeping exact figures close to her chest.

“At the end of the day, I want to tell readers, ‘We’ve got your back,’” Fox says. “Whether that’s with city hall, or figuring out where to buy your next house. That’s our service.”

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

CBC and The Weather Network Discuss Online Commenting

The Importance of Commenting from RTDNA 2017 Conference

In the RTDNA session, Commentary, Commenting and Diversifying Your Voices, our Head of Marketing, Allison Munro, moderated a conversation with news media executives from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and The Weather Network (Pelmorex Media). The two panelists included Jack Nagler, the Director of Journalistic Public Accountability and Engagement at CBC, and Carrie Lysenko, the Head of Digital at Pelmorex Media. Their discussion explored the pros and cons of online commenting and how news media organizations can overcome the challenges.

How Important is Commenting in News Media?

For the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), commenting is not just a value add; it’s critically important for their brand strategy. One of their goals is to provide Canadians with a place to explore their diverse opinions, and commenting supports this vision. Nagler states that commenting has helped them become a better newsroom because their readers improve the stories being told.

At The Weather Network, Lysenko stated that commenting is important because nature-enthusiasts want a forum to share their opinions, photos and videos. Lysenko also noted that when they turned off comments, there was a significant drop in pageviews and attention time.

This echoes our findings that brands with commenting can increase their pageviews by 248% and attention time by 364%. Researchers for the MIT Sloan Management Review also confirm that users’ willingness to pay for subscriptions increases with their growing online social activity.

“Only an engaged user will become a long-term subscriber.”
—Tobias Henning, GM of BILD

A majority of website visitors would also agree that website commenting is valuable. In a recent survey of their audience, CBC found that 70% of respondents said that comments were important to them. Furthermore, they saw that 70% of website visitors spend at least 15% of their time onsite just reading comments.

Using Comments to Create New Stories

CBC receives story tips and article corrections within their comment section from their loyal readers and watchers. Nagler asserts that audience contributions add a lot of value to their articles as they spur further discussions and stories.

He gave an example about an article on a wedding party that fell ill during their stay at a resort. After reading the story, another reader commented that she too got sick at the same place. From there, an investigative story was born, providing valuable information to other travellers.

CBC now takes their top comments and creates stories from them in the Revenge of the Comment Section. As these stories are made from comments, they offer a quick and cost-effective way for publishers to post new content.

Similarly, users share their photos and videos with The Weather Network, which drives further engagement and new content. Lysenko described when The Weather Network connected one of their website contributors to Canada Post to create an official stamp. After viewing the photo he submitted, they made arrangements to create the stamp and tracked his story on their website.

 

Three SEO Benefits of Online Commenting

User-generated content, such as comments, can be indexed by Google if it’s placed higher on the webpage. For example, editors can choose their favorite comments and place those quotes within the body of an article.

Furthermore, pages with active content updates, such as new comments, can trigger additional reindexing and improve the recency and relevance of the page in search results.

Your audience may also use keywords around a topic that differ from what journalists write, and can provide closer matches to search terms.

The Truth Behind Facebook Commenting

While your Facebook page may be a hotspot for online commenting, it can’t take the place of commenting on your website. And it’s not only because your direct website visitors are more loyal than your Facebook readers, but also because Facebook doesn’t give publishers all their first-party audience data from commenters. (Similarly, Facebook’s free commenting platform for websites also keeps your invaluable data.)

Both CBC and The Weather Network recognize that publishers should focus on getting readers to comment on their websites and collecting their audience data. That doesn’t mean Facebook or its tools shouldn’t be used at all; in fact, Social Login is an extremely valuable tool for news media websites.

When users are able to register for news websites through their social media account, this greatly reduces friction when signing up. It can even increase conversion rates by 20% to 40%. Lysenko adds that if you have the capability to import data from their social account into their user profile on your website, then you’re taking advantage of Facebook login without giving away your data.

“Direct visitors are more loyal than Facebook visitors.”
—Terri Walter, CMO of Chartbeat

Moderation is the #1 Challenge for Community Management

Both panelists say that the greatest challenge to commenting is moderating online discussions in real time. With so many trolls online, moderation is vital for publishers who want to provide a safe space for their users. And according to Engaging News Project, users’ interest in returning to a website almost doubles if they know the discussion will be civil.

CBC found difficulties with both pre-moderation and post-moderation. With the former method, moderators review comments before they get published. But this time-consuming task doesn’t allow for real-time discussions, which are so important for timely news and weather events. With the latter method, users are able to post comments without review, and inappropriate comments only get removed if they are flagged by the community and reviewed by a moderator. While this avenue is much less time-consuming, brands risk having content on their website that doesn’t align with their guidelines.

Like some media companies, CBC has even opted out of commenting altogether on certain stories that may trigger heated arguments. Similarly, The Weather Network chose to disable commenting on stories about climate change, finding too many undesirable comments between advocates and deniers.

Since then, The Weather Network has decided to employ automated moderation to manage their online communities. Automated moderation uses artificial intelligence to automatically detect and delete offensive comments. This allows conversations to unfold in real time while maintaining a brand’s community guidelines.

Human Moderation

81
Accuracy

Automated Moderation

92
Accuracy

They have also decided to offer self-moderation tools that allow users to personalize their online experience. These include the ability to mute other users and to dislike and flag comments.

Save Time and Resources with Automated Moderation

Website commenting has been an important feature for both the CBC and The Weather Network, helping them increase brand loyalty.

It’s also been invaluable to their audiences, who enjoy reading the comment section and sharing their content with others. However, many users get deterred from engaging on your website if the discussions aren’t civil and respectful.

Automated moderation is the latest solution to this problem, giving media brands a cost-effective way to moderate their communities. Media organizations have also shown that automated moderation drives further engagement, by increasing comments, likes and registered users, while significantly reducing flagging and the time and effort needed by moderators.

Interested in learning more about Automated Moderation?

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

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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.

Connect Now
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