Tag: Audience Development

New Data: 40% of Your Subscribers Are Sleeping On Your Content

Let’s say you’ve effectively done all of the right things to acquire new subscribers. You’ve created really interesting content and pushed it out for your readers to consume. Before you know it, you’ve monetized your efforts with a new batch of converted paid subscribers.

That’s the good news, and an accomplishment that your publishing team should be proud to hold up as a gold medal. The journey doesn’t end when readers agree to subscribe, though. Once you have new subscribers, you need to monitor how actively engaged those subscribers are with the content on your website.

Who Are The Active Subscribers And Who Are The Sleeping Subscribers?

You want to organize your subscribers into different tiers based on their level of engagement with the website. Bucket users into labels of active subscribers, who are the ones that visit and engage the site on a near daily basis, and sleeping subscribers, which describes people who seldom return to the site after they become subscribers.

Your active subscribers are your highest valued customers with the greatest potential customer lifetime value (CLTV). These subscribers visit your site daily or weekly to consume fresh content, and they’ll often engage in community activities, such as commenting or participating in lively discussions with other readers. When the time comes for the subscription to renew, there’s little chance that a churn will occur instead.

On the other end of the spectrum are your “sleeping subscribers.” These subscribers have paid for a subscription, which is a good thing. According to your audience insights and analytics platforms, they haven’t visited the website since they completed the subscription form.

Studies have shown that sleeping subscribers make up approximately 40% of a publisher’s subscription base. Sleeping subscribers have the highest probability to churn before the subscription renewal, so it’s vitally important to re-engage and retain as many of those subscriptions as feasibly possible.

Remind Sleeping Subscribers Their Journey With Your Publication Has Only Begun

There’s an old saying in the publishing space that 80% of recurring revenue comes from 20% of paid subscribers. Essentially, this means that subscribers who are the most active and the most engaged with your content are responsible for providing the bulk of subscription revenue to your publication.

The driving reason for this challenge is that up to half of your existing subscriber base is not motivated to come back to the site. Once they complete the subscription, they feel their journey with your website has come to an end. As a successful publishing business, your job is to remind them that the journey has only begun.

According to the American Press Institute, only 31% of publishers target low-engagement subscribers with re-engagement campaigns before their subscription renewal dates come up. That means your business can be one of the three out of ten that forms a successful re-engagement strategy to convert the sleepers into active users.

Re-engagement is the most important step in this process. If subscribers are not engaged with your content, they’re likely to balk when the renewal charge comes up on their bank statements. A churn is likely to occur… Unless you can win them back over and remind them why they subscribed to your website in the first place.

First-Party Data Is The Alarm To Wake Sleeping Subscribers

Using an audience insights platform to collect first-party data, you have the necessary touchpoints to form rich audience profiles of your subscribers. Build those profiles so that you can gain a better understanding of how to wake up the sleepers.

You can view the articles they consumed that led them to go beyond the paywall. You can identify topics that resonated to drive the subscription in the first place. You can see what authors they followed, or community discussions they participated in that really shone a light on their passion for a subject.

All of these touchpoints are examples of first-party data that tell you what motivated your sleeping subscribers to pay for your content in the first place. Use that knowledge to build highly personalized emails and activate re-engagement campaigns to awaken those sleepers and guide them back to your publishing experience.

Send Personalized Emails To Shake The Sleepers Awake

Since you’ve collected the audience data and built out the profiles, you already know the best way to re-engage with your sleeping subscribers. Now, you just need to create the messaging to facilitate that re-engagement strategy.

Use your content recommendation module to pull out the articles that align with the topics which led your sleepers to initially subscribe for your content. Once the recommendation engine feeds you the suggestions, drop the links into highly personalized newsletter email templates. Create messaging that triggers the same passion as the articles that led the sleepers on their initial journey with your site to reinvoke those same feelings.

By reminding them of that experience, the sleepers will wake up and they’ll follow those links back to your site. This is when you can create a whole new personalized experience to convert sleeping subscribers into active subscribers with the highest CLTV potential.

Data Is King: Personal Experiences Boost Conversions By 30%

What’s your preferred experience with published content? Would you prefer a site that feeds you generic articles, or a publisher that knows how to personalize the content you see? The obvious answer is the second option. A personalized website is far more enjoyable as it provides the topics, opinions, and commentary that speak directly to your unique set of interests.

Some publications are better at personalization than others. These publications know how to identify if an article, or even a headline, will encourage readers to spend more time on the site. Their content is informative and capable of adding value to the reader’s experience so they feel compelled to consume the story. They also know how to use highly targeted links within the articles to drive up clickthrough rates.

By adopting personalization as part of an overarching content strategy, publishers remain connected to readers who are very protective of what they consume. There’s a rising trend of “selective news avoidance” all over the world. According to CNN, only 23% of people get their news from news websites. Young people, in particular, are more likely to use social media for news updates.

Can Personalized Content Trump News Avoidance?

Reuters Institute commissioned their annual Digital News Report. The study analyzed a YouGov survey of 93,000 participants from 46 different countries. Among the key findings was a growing lack of trust in newsworthy content, a problem with its strongest foothold in the United States. Only 26% of US respondents say they trust the news, a three point decline from 2021, and the lowest positive sentiment among all surveyed nations.

Common reasons cited for selective news avoidance have to do with growing polarization, perceived media bias, and a sense of too much politics in the news. But a senior Reuters executive, who helped commission the Digital News Report, says the issue goes much deeper.

“A large number of those who selectively avoid the news say the news has a negative effect on their mood,” says Rasmus K. Nielsen, Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Click-Bait Headlines Or Insightful Titles: Which Is The Best Approach?

What are the primary causes for news avoidance? According to the International Institute of Information Technology – Hyderabad (IIIT-H), one of the reasons could be that some publishers rely too frequently on “click-bait headlines.”

In a research study entitled “Clickbait’s Impact On Visual Attention-An Eye Tracker Study,” IIIT-H studied gaze-fixation from 60 participants to measure the amount of visual attention paid by readers to different articles. One group of articles had click-bait headlines, while the other group used educational titles. The results found that click-bait headlines received far less visual attention from readers than articles with non-click-bait headlines.

Click-bait headlines promote a misleading title separate from the crux and context of the article content. According to IIIT-H, people feel duped by misleading headlines, feeling a disconnection between the promoted title and the body of the article. They abandon the page rather than continue the experience, reducing total engagement rates.

Instead of creating false headlines to trigger quick clickthrough rates, successful publishers create thought provoking titles, encouraging readers to consume the entire article. The best way to create headlines that generate engagement is to develop a deeper understanding of what resonates with the intended reading audience. To gain those audience insights, you can use the power of first-party data to align engagement strategies with audience preferences.

First-Party Data Is The Intersection For Creators And Readers

Two of the best examples of first-party data are pageviews and time on-site. You can rest assured that people are intrigued by your content if both of these numbers are trending in the upward direction.

Aim to develop a deeper understanding of what best resonates with your readers. You can identify commonalities in things like the tone of the articles, the positioning of the headlines, common topical themes, and certain keywords that appear in articles with the highest amount of reader engagement.

Your creative team can access these findings in your audience insights platform dashboard to view the results for themselves. They can view the data and clearly identify which articles earn the most engagement from readers. This will help them pivot the content strategy to focus on future stories that support greater audience engagement.

Profile, Personalize, Perform: The Power Of First-Party Data

There’s a lot of power to be wielded with first-party data, which gives your publication a leg up on competitors. Your audience insights platform stores demographic details about your readers, including variables like age, location, backgrounds, and past consumption behaviors on your website. Pool these insights together into rich audience profiles that tell your creators how different types of readers are likely to engage with the content.

You can also segment your audience into different buckets: new readers, known readers, and subscribed readers. The difference in each audience category is measured by their degree of engagement with your website. New readers are fresh to the site, which means there’s very little behavioral data to profile. Known readers are people who have provided at least one example of first-party demographic data that you can use to start building your profiles. Subscribed readers are those who have fully converted and actively paid for premium access to your best content.

As you build your audience profiles, focus intently on the subscribed audience. Look back at the patterns that led people on the journey to fill out the subscription form. What were the articles they read? What common topics or themes were prevalent in those stories? Where did they spend the most time on your site?

Using these enriched profiles, coupled with the data you have on your top performing content, you have all of the necessary information to personalize what readers experience the next time they visit your site. You can deploy highly segmented examples of content that appeal to different readers at each stage in the consumption journey with your website.

Focus on creating personalized content that enables those deep journeys, which should help boost subscription conversion rates by 30%. Watch those pageview and time on-site metrics shoot through the roof by deploying this strategic approach!

How To Prepare For Your Next Live Event Success Story

When it comes to holding live events, a seamless user experience is paramount. People have come to your platform to engage with its content, event coverage, and to interact with like-minded members of the community. If there are barriers to discoverability, technological hoops to jump through, and endless points of friction after their arrival – visitors will look elsewhere and take with them their potential contributions to your organization’s growth.

In the wake of your first big live event, an assessment of your user engagement and registration rates leading up to, during, and after the big day will help you gather valuable insights. That said, if this is your first rodeo, what can be done to set your platform up for success without prior experience or concrete data? What can an audience-first strategy do to drive a frictionless user experience? 

Don’t let a lack of data determine the success of your first big live event. There are steps you can take to ensure gains in positive engagement and registration rates. Those gains will come hand in hand with abundant data and audience insights essential for when optimizing your strategy for next time.  

Everyone wins when a live event succeeds

International events like the World Cup are incredible opportunities for platforms ready to make their live event debut. Something like the World Cup gives companies a chance to be the platform that connects audiences to valuable content like live venue coverage, events being held around the world that are World Cup related, and exciting discourse with the sports community. It’s imperative to keep the ‘live’ in live events; create a space where visitors can connect and share, comment on plays made by the world’s superstars, and experience the thrill of watching the World Cup with fellow fans in real time.

Assuming your live event attendance is good and your audience is engaged, satisfied, and happy to register in exchange for the value of the experience you’ve prepared for them, the rewards to your preparation will be immediately evident.

  • Interactions = Insights: Live events are an excellent opportunity to acquire first-party data and gain insight into the tastes, preferences, and sentiments of visitors. Those insights can then be used to hone your audience-first strategy and optimize the content you put out thereafter.
  • Reusable: when the event comes to a close, consider keeping it up for a while. If it was a successful event, there’s a good chance it could continue to be a valuable entry point for future or returning visitors. Work the landing page into your overarching experience and motivate more people to embark on deeper journeys into your site.

Consistency earns brand loyalty

Maintaining consistency in the look, feel, and tone of your platform is an important conversion point on its own. Consistency gives way to familiarity and taps into the same user tastes, preferences, and sentiments you should be catering to based on the insights you’ve gathered from their data.

Consistent user experiences are prime examples of how to convert more event attendees into loyal subscribers. The average conversion rate from live event attendees is 12.6%, and over one third of organizations convert users at rates higher than the average.

The purpose of live events is to leverage a time-sensitive, traffic heavy, and topical event in order to convert as many visitors to registered users and reward the loyalty of existing core users. It is, in the truest sense of the term, a value exchange moment. By providing users with the opportunity to engage with a special event they care about with as little friction as possible, your brand stands to earn the trust of users and become recognized as a provider of an experience worth their time and interest, not to mention something they see as worth sharing within their networks and beyond.

Tech solutions for live event first-timers

The right technology can bring all of these ideas to fruition. Digital community experience platforms power highly engaging live event experiences that dramatically increase engagement, page views, and registrations throughout the event. These platforms often also provide assistance with conversion strategies that earn more brand loyal users over time.

The Second Screen Experience

The multi-screen experience isn’t new. For many, scrolling on their phone has become an essential part of watching television – live events or not. Who among us hasn’t googled ‘Is Zendaya a nepotism baby?’.  It’s second nature at this point, and an excellent behaviour to consider when optimizing your approach to engagement. People need to be able to watch and interact with content at once.

When planning your upcoming live event, make sure that your platform facilitates a valuable second-screen experience. Give users the freedom to engage through your website or app; let them comment on big moments, interact with fellow attendees, and ask questions of expert speakers or panellists. This is one of the best ways to immerse people within the live event experience and earn their brand loyalty and trust in you as a content provider that understands them.

Live Blogging

Not everyone has time to pay attention to a live event in its entirety. Regular day to day busy schedules aside, some events may be occurring in different time zones and over hours, days, or weeks in some cases. Leaving this consideration out of your pre-event planning would be a disservice to its potential for success.

A platform with a built-in live blogging feature is an excellent way to provide folks the chance to enjoy the event without scheduling conflicts or inflicting FOMO on potential visitors. People can focus on the tasks they need to complete and use their second screens to follow along with minute to minute updates posted to the live blog. If they get a moment, they can comment on one of the updates and start a conversation with other members of the community.

AI Moderation

Not everyone is comfortable expressing their feelings or opinions. Those concerns are stronger on the web where trolls can easily attack or demonize other event attendees. If people don’t feel comfortable, they may stay silent or worse – leave. They miss out on the experience you’ve spent so much time preparing for them, and you miss out on valuable first-party data insights.

A platform that incorporates a moderation engine into its framework is a fantastic first line of defence. These AI moderation tools can enforce and maintain community guidelines in the absence of a 24 hour team of moderators. Any language deemed inappropriate is flagged and removed from the comments section, helping others feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and feelings without fear of being cyber attacked by bullies or trolls.

Preparation is everything

All of these strategies, digital experience platforms, and live event engagement styles are at your disposal. Each one (or a mix) is capable of helping you launch a successful live event. That said, it’s imperative to keep in mind that your approach to live events must be aligned with your organization, the rest of your content and communications, and the company’s values as well as those of its loyal subscribers. 

Beyond that, another important consideration when planning live events is ‘will this be worth their time and does it show them we are focused on their interests and preferences?’. A well planned and timely live event has the potential to reinvigorate a waning publication, it’s simply a matter of preparing your platform to win over the eager masses headed your way with a valuable and rewarding experience.

Community-Focused Tools And Tactics To Hit KPI and ROI Goals

This was originally posted on INMA.

If your current Digital Experience Platform(DXP) isn’t serving your community, or rather, is not enabling your organization to serve, sustain, and expand your community, then it’s not worth your money. 

Furthermore, if you are fortunate enough to be host to a community, particularly one that enjoys engaging with and discovering the realm of their interests that you’ve created, you’re sitting on a gold mine of growth potential and first party data. 

It’s no secret that an active, non-toxic community is a powerful driver of audience growth, but in order to make the most of community driven conversion opportunities there are some preparatory measures that can be taken. 

Community Foundation

Before we begin honing in on the inner-workings of your community, take stock of the tools and strategies you currently have in place and assess whether or not they are providing a worthwhile ROI. Some questions to ask as you set about this task are:

Infrastructure and Discoverability

Does your site’s architecture drive visitors intuitively to where the community is at its best, or are there a number of barriers in their way? 

Consider where on their journey users are confronted with a sign-up form of some sort. Then, evaluate if there’s greater potential for conversion by giving them a bit of free reign to see the value you have to offer elsewhere. Giving unregistered users enough access to see but not join on-site discussions or special events like a live Ask-Me-Anything community chat could be just the kind of content that is worth their time and, subsequently, their registered first-party data. 

Does your current comment interface and strategy help or hinder engagement?

Providing users with the means to easily jump into the comments section and join discussions is an effective way to improve engagement. Recently, Viafoura partnered up with News-Press & Gazette Co. (NPG) to help them over-haul their prior approach to comment sections that relied on manual approval, resulting in endless queues of user contributions stuck in limbo. After integrating Viafoura’s Automated Moderation onto their platform, NPG saw a drastic improvement in their overall engagement as well as the complete reactivation of previously stagnant communities across a number of their sites.

Community Health

Have you and your teams taken measures to ensure that when new visitors arrive they’re greeted by a wholesome and inviting community? 

If some of the first things visitors see are comments and discussions rife with vitriol and toxicity, they won’t stay long – if at all. In order to keep the peace and foster a welcoming space for newcomers, it’s imperative that you provide clear and concise community guidelines. These guidelines will assist in the preservation of your community’s well being by giving its members and your moderation teams consistent parameters to follow while reinforcing your brand values and interests while doing so. 

In order to scale down some of the more taxing and meticulous moderation tasks (profanity, hate speech etc.), adopting an Intelligent Moderation Engine is a turn-key solution for immediate deflection of toxicity. 

Create a Playground of Engagement

Plainly: creating an engaging and discoverable user experience (UX) will invigorate your audience. As publishers, there is an obvious responsibility to provide your readers with high-quality content that stands out in the vast and highly saturated digital media landscape. More specifically, as digital publishers, the journey that users go on as they experience your site and its content is just as important.

A digital media platform that gives its users a range of capabilities to engage – be it through exploration, discovery, or community – is guaranteed a far higher chance of earning consistent growth in registrations, longer time spent on-site, and an increasingly concise understanding of their audience’s behaviour and interests. All of which can contribute to an improvement in ad-revenue by providing you with the data necessary to prove the worth of your premium ad space to potential partners.

Topic and Author Follows

Topic and Author following capabilities are highly engaging points of conversion and excellent data collection avenues. By tracking what content and which authors are being followed via built in analytics, editorial and content strategies can be adjusted to meet the evident interests being shown in the declarative data that comes from these community specific actions.

In terms of engagement, users who follow particular authors or topics also have a far higher propensity for return visits because of the notifications they’ll receive when more content tied to what they follow is published.

Conclusion

In this digital age where an extensive and engaging digital experience platform is paramount to the success and longevity of digital media organizations, taking the time to create rewarding and enjoyable experiences for your audience communities is the least we can do. With the right tools and approach to a community focused growth strategy, publishers will make short work of achieving their ROIs and surpassing previous KPI goals.

Top Revenue Diversification Streams For Publishers

At the root of every digital publication is an inherent goal to educate, interest, and engage with the intended audience. By providing relevant and informative content to the end users, publishers create thoughtful and fulfilling relationships with their readers. A consistent stream of high quality content motivates readers to return to the site and continue to consume the content.

The cycle repeats itself until the reader develops an affinity for the publishing brand. Visiting the website for the latest updates on the news of the day becomes part of a daily habit. As that habit becomes a growing need, those same readers become brand loyal users. These are the people with the highest potential to become paying subscribers for your top quality content.

All of that is well and good for building a loyal audience of passionate and engaged readers. But how do you monetize those efforts, and how can you introduce new revenue streams to scale growth higher and faster while maintaining publication standards and providing quality journalism? That’s what we’re going to discuss here.

Challenges for revenue-driven publication leaders

Increasing revenue requires a proactive push for subscriptions and a delivery of highly targeted ad inserts as part of an affiliate marketing program. The good news is that, according to Pew Research Center, 86% of American citizens get their news through a smartphone, tablet, or computer.

More importantly, over half of respondents said they prefer consuming content through these devices as opposed to TV, radio, or podcasts. This means there does remain a sizable audience to monetize from through revenue diversification strategies.

The bad news is that, as polarization deepens throughout the population, the amount of trust in journalism has waned. This is a particularly growing problem for US publishers.

According to a study published by Statista, United States citizens rank lowest on a list of 40 countries whose residents say they trust the media. Only 26% of surveyed Americans say they trust the news media. By contrast, 37% of neighboring Mexicans say they trust the media, while 42% of neighboring Canadians admit they trust their news sources.

All of these insights emphasize why there’s such a strong need for a high quality content strategy. Aligning content production to the tastes and interests of the intended audience is essential to boost onsite engagement. That’s what allows you to run affiliate marketing campaigns with select partners.

Examples of revenue diversification channels

As a business model, it’s always critical to live by the adage “never put all of your eggs in one basket.” The more you can diversify means of generating revenue, the less likely you are to falter if one of those channels stops performing at the level that your business needs. When it comes to revenue diversification strategies, knowing how to utilize each of the channels available to grow your brand is vital to scaling new growth.

So what are some of the channels available for your revenue diversification strategy? Here’s a quick breakdown of each and how best to use them to your advantage.

Subscription models: win them over with quality

This is probably the most straightforward revenue generating model for publications. By convincing more of your reading audience to pay for access to your top shelf content, you’re earning direct value out of each posted story across your publication.

Many readers actively want to add their own opinions to a published piece of content. If you gate access to the comments section and the community behind it, you incentivize those readers to become paying customers.

In exchange, they gain the means to participate in lively discussions with other engaged readers. It’s a two way relationship that benefits the reader and your publication. You just need to guide people to that decision by doubling down on high quality content that increases their propensity to respond.

E-commerce strategies: target the right offers to the right people

It goes without saying that data is essential for any digital experience to become a successful venture. However, the type of data makes all the difference between publications that have something to sell to their e-commerce affiliates and those that don’t.

First-party data has become the backbone of any e-commerce engagement strategy. It’s by using first-party data that targeted shopping experiences are provided to the audience. This type of data allows you to build highly informative audience profiles in which you can segment your readers by their interests and what types of content best capture their attention.

By curating these profiles, you can coordinate with your e-commerce affiliates to create relevant shopping experiences for the intended audiences. Align the offers to the reader’s passions, which you can determine based on the content they consume. This is how you improve the user experience and make some extra money through your affiliates.

Affiliate links: personalize ad inserts for maximum effectiveness

This is a very similar approach to your e-commerce strategy. Using first-party data and the profiles you create from it, your affiliates can customize the ad inserts they promote to specific types of readers on your site.

Customization and personalization are the best ways to generate views, clicks, and engagement from targeted advertising. Show your affiliates details about the end audience so that they can create highly curated messaging, images, videos, and other forms of content to connect with the audience. If done successfully, they should see a healthy return for their efforts.

Flexible commercial models: putting it together

Imagine if you could give your affiliate partners the ability to form a trusted partnership built around reliable, audience-driven, first-party data. How much more valuable would a relationship with your publication be to those affiliates as opposed to a standard commercial revenue vendor type relationship that other publishers will offer? There’s no question: you gain a significant competitive advantage by offering a commercial revenue partnership.

The first-party data you possess and the audience profiles you build allow affiliates to send out promotions that will earn engagement. People end up coming to your site and the site of your affiliates. It’s more scalable, more flexible, and more beneficial for everyone involved.

Conclusion

With an analytical approach to the data available to you, a definitive goal, and an audience-first content strategy, the right revenue growth tactics will become increasingly evident. Keep in mind that each of the above approaches, while uniquely effective, may not align with your brand and its interests – which is OK! Carefully curate strategies that are in alignment with your brand’s overarching POV and they will in turn effectively serve the long term goals of your organization and contribute to the growth of your audience and, subsequently, your revenue.

New Study Finds Publisher-Posted First Comment Steers Engaging Conversation

Audience engagement managers know that a healthy comment section is a core component to building a healthy online community. With contentious political debates happening with greater frequency and more people turning to the internet to vent frustration, maintaining a civil yet lively  comment section has become more important than ever.

Thankfully, one simple technique can help publishers and moderators guide conversations with increased peace of mind. According to a new study from Viafoura, media outlets see a significant increase in traffic, civility and engagement when publishers post the first comment.

Posting the first comment has long been a technique used by social media managers and influencers in order to control the tone of the conversation and create engagement. The first comment operates as an ‘ice-breaker’ and helps set the standard for the conversation. It also invites responses from readers, which can increase time spent on site and enhance brand loyalty.


What happens when publishers post first? 

The study took place between September 28th and December 15th 2021 in 15 newsrooms across Canada covering a diverse selection of geographical regions and various ends of the political spectrum. Each newsroom posted the first comment on a number of articles across their publications, within the first hour of the articles going live. This test group was then compared to a baseline group in order to provide context to the results. 

One element of the study that differed from platform to platform was the type of comment posted beneath the article. Tactics varied from newsroom to newsroom. Some editors offered users assistance, responding to particular points in the article or answering questions. Others asked specific, directed, questions about readers’ response to the article. Writers had the freedom to bring their voice and creativity to the comment section!

Over the course of the study, Viafoura collected data on volume of comments, time spent commenting and conversion before and after engagement – three crucial metrics used  to evaluate the success of an online community space. 


Posting first means increased engagement, conversion & peace of mind

The study found that activity increased dramatically across all metrics, with a 45% increase in time in comments, 380% increase in total average comments and a 347% increase in average likes. This drastic increase indicates that controlling the first comment sets a tone and leads to more civil discourse. 

With a standard set of behavior in place, moderation needs decreased. While the baseline group was required to flag 6.8% of posts and disable 9.1% of users, the test group saw significantly reduced numbers, with 4.8% flagged and 7.4% disabled. Simply by modeling good behavior, publishers reduced the number of community guideline violations and user bans. 

Perhaps the most surprising result was the significant increase in registrations. 

Previous research has shown that almost 50% of members end up removing themselves from a platform when exposed to trolling. In contrast, when publishers posted the first comment, each article saw a 55% increase in registrations, with a 9% increase in users who attempted to interact with commenting before signing up.

The positive impact didn’t stop at conversion. Viafoura also saw a 21% increase in users who interacted with commenting after signup. This indicates that users participated in the discourse, felt positive enough to register, and then continued to feel engaged and loyal past the point of conversion. 

This data supports the notion that posting the first comment can be a significant step in reaching target conversion goals. When publishers interact directly with their community, they help maintain a sense of safety and attention that can lead to a direct increase in engagement.
 

What can we conclude?

Strong customer loyalty is essential for the wellness and longevity of any online brand. Simple moderation tricks can be the difference between a contentious online conversation and a  thriving online community. 

By setting the tone for conversation, publishers can direct content, invite polite discourse and even tailor their engagement to suit the needs and interests of their target audience. In each case, first comments have proven to be an essential step in the process of protecting and growing digital communities. 

Why Comment Moderation Vendors Need to go Above and Beyond to Protect Their Partners

Media companies, like all brands, are looking to build recognition and trust by publishing user-generated content. However, publishing this content isn’t risk-free: organizations need to ensure that users aren’t publishing offensive or threatening posts on their websites or apps. This is where content moderation comes into the picture.

In today’s modern environment, organizations are doing everything possible to ensure that civility exists on their digital properties while, at the same time, promoting free speech and opinionated conversations. Many of them have implemented moderation solutions that use live moderators or run automated algorithms to solve this challenge.

The general population has also become aware of moderation — especially what it does and why it’s being used. So what happens when your moderation partner becomes more than another ordinary technology vendor?

Recently, a Viafoura customer and one of the largest publishers in the UK discovered why the Viafoura moderation team is so much more than a partner.

The publisher uses both the AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Live Moderation solutions from Viafoura. As the AI solution learns and enforces the community guidelines set forth by the publisher, 85% to 90% of all comments are easily moderated by its AI engine. The remaining “questionable comments” are sent to a live moderator for a judgment call.

Earlier this year, one of those comments was sent to a live moderator at Viafoura. A user made a threat to a nursery in the commenting section, which of course was flagged and sent to the moderation queue.

Instead of just blocking the comment and banning the user, Viafoura’s moderation employee contacted the publisher’s team to explain the situation. The employees at the large publishing company immediately addressed the situation with local law enforcement.

In under half an hour of the comment being posted, the police took action.

Thanks to the quick thinking of Viafoura and the publisher’s employees, who went the extra mile, a potentially terrible situation was entirely avoided.

“Moderation is much more than a judgment call of ensuring user-generated content upholds platform-specific guidelines and rules to establish the suitability of the content for publishing,” says Leigh Adams, director of moderation services at Viafoura. “Yes, we are all about maintaining our customers’ standards, but it’s also about recognizing when a comment has to be escalated. We pride ourselves on having staff that know what to do when — and go the extra mile to reach out to our customers — because we have the relationship to do that easily.”

First-Party Data Or Social Media Advertising: Which To Use?

Companies all over the world spend millions of dollars on social media advertising. For many years, it’s been one of the best avenues for brands seeking to expand their reach and visibility. By building a social following, brands gain direct access to customers already interested in their services and from there, speak to them directly and set about converting them into paying customers.

However, social media metrics leave much to the imagination, which is not an ideal way to set about developing audience strategies. Likes and comments on social posts are hard to quantify without more specific data, though some of the declarative data uncovered therein can help further an understanding of audience behaviors. Without access to concrete, sophisticated data, how can you build relevant audience profiles to augment your publishing strategy? And without those profiles, how do you know what to advertise to new audiences? How can you convince third-party affiliates to advertise on your site?

Publishers have recognized first-party data as not only a viable alternative to social media metrics, but a far more valuable resource with rich insights instrumental to audience growth and activation, subscription revenue, ad revenue, retention, and so much more. By investing in a first-party data strategy and taking advantage of resources that help you acquire, analyze, and interpret insights, publishers can track audience engagement across their digital property portfolios. By doing so, they’re able to make informed strategic decisions that drive conversion and support the efficacy of their audience funnels, thus ushering unregistered visitors into paid subscriptions. 

Publishers report less value in social media advertising

A telling sign of how publishers are rethinking their approach to audience insights and how to spend their advertising dollars is revealed through the Publishers and Social Media: 2021 Trends report conducted by Echobox. 

Based on a survey of 159 publishers from over 40 different countries, the findings revealed that 63% of respondents believed discovering and tapping into new audiences is now more important than ever. For publishers hoping to lead the curve, this report indicates an evident need for audience expansion strategies that connect to fresh eyed audiences as opposed to relying on brand-aware users who sought them out through social media channels.

In the same study, only 29% of publishers chose to prioritize investments in new social media channels. While many respondents said social media continues to be an excellent resource for “more referral traffic,” little is mentioned about the conversion rate to transform referral traffic into paid content subscriptions.

Additionally, social media algorithms continue to remain beyond the control of publishers who must do their best to anticipate upcoming changes and implement contingency plans for detrimental algorithmic changes. Four out of ten respondents say constant changes to Facebook’s algorithm cause an extreme and unexpected impact on traffic. This inconsistency makes it hard for publishers to predict accurate growth in both website visits and new subscription rates.

First-party data is a response to the changing times

Sometimes, the best growth strategy is less about bringing in more traffic from social media to a publishing site and more closely tied to establishing an approach that optimizes existing traffic with behavioral data. These insights are used by publishers to enhance content strategies by aligning writers and editors around data-driven audience insights. Data-informed teams are far better prepared to produce more content that strikes a chord with audiences and leaves them eager for more and prone to return visits with longer page visit durations.

Part of the reason for this approach is in reaction to updated consumer privacy protection laws. Mandates like GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy protection legislation have begun a depreciation, or retirement, of third-party cookies, which Google will indefinitely eliminate by 2023. These cookies have traditionally been used by brands and publishers to acquire audience insights and support advertising campaigns.

According to Google, 90% of North and South American publishers say stricter consumer privacy laws have forced them to adapt their strategies. Now, the vast majority of these publishers are leaning into first-party data in order to acquire more accurate and detailed information about their customers. First-party data allows publishers to build enriched audience profiles that third-party cookies and social media engagement could never provide.

Publisher ownership of first-party data leverages revenue-driven affiliate partnerships

First-party data gives publishers the insights and sophisticated specificity to enhance and take ownership of the direct relationship with their audiences. Since audience insights are acquired through reader interaction with published content, publishers retain the rights to that first-party data. This provides powerful leverage for publishers to increase advertising revenue through highly curated partnerships with specific affiliate advertisers.

It’s a great way to appeal to affiliates eager to advertise at a time when advertising budgets are being cut. Recent economic downturns have forced companies to scale back on their ad budgets, though they do still need to generate awareness and engagement.

As the proprietors of detailed first-party audience data, publishers can incentivize affiliate advertisers to spend their limited budgets wisely on ad inserts with the greatest potential for engagement and conversion. It’s a strategy that companies like Trusted Media Brands have successfully delivered upon, which has generated 40% year over year programmatic revenue growth.

Social media casts a wide net; first-party data chooses the right bait

When calculating the ROI on advertising campaigns, a helpful way to look at the dichotomy between social media advertising and using first-party data to connect with affiliates is to think of it like an analogy for fishing.

Social media advertising is essentially casting a wide net out into the digital ocean. The hope is that you use the social media algorithms effectively to maximize reach and engagement. Through that engagement, you need high clickthrough rates (CTRs) so that you have the best potential to grow paid subscribers of your content. Those subscriptions are the final achievement to prove the merit behind your social media advertising strategy.

There are a lot of holes in that approach, which is why using a first-party data strategy to convince affiliates that they should advertise on your site is far more effective. With first-party data and the audience profiles and segmentation it can provide, you don’t need to cast a wide net and hope for the best. Instead, you’re in a position to convince the right affiliates that their products and messaging have the greatest potential to connect with the consumers that make up your engaged audiences. When we choose the right bait, we stand a greater chance of catching exactly what we’re after.

First-party data is a win for publications and audiences alike. Audiences benefit from the improvements it informs and appreciate the thoughtful content produced for their interests. Publishers on the other hand stand to benefit greatly from the ability to appeal to their affiliates and encourage them to invest more of their advertising budgets into developing extensive relationships with their publication. Everybody wins and everybody gets more of what they want!

What is a value exchange moment?

Publishing in the digital age, not unlike advertising, has become a conversation between audiences and content providers. A conversation that’s full of opportunities to form substantial and lasting relationships, that is – as long as both sides stand to benefit from a value exchange. Through entertainment, information and fostering a sense of community, it’s up to publishers to give audiences something worthwhile for what they have to offer as digital individuals: unique, rich, first party data.

If publishers are able to create interest, garner engagement, and earn subscriptions and all the first party data that comes with them, they gain a huge advantage. Continued access to first party data will inform improvements to their audience development strategy and usher in new growth; growth in their following and subscriber base and inevitably a marked boost to ad and subscription revenues.

However, digital savvy consumers are hyper focused on protecting their privacy by knowing exactly who’s collecting their data and what it’s being used for. Just recently, fast food chain Tim Hortons came under fire for collecting data without proper consent. Users will typically agree to provide personal data only if they believe it’s worth what they get in exchange. This decision is what we refer to as a value exchange moment, a point in time where the end user decides if what they receive is worth their trust and, of course, their personal information.

While the value a publisher may traditionally provide is content, more and more we are seeing that community has become a huge draw for prospective subscribers. For example, a user who regularly engages with a publisher’s content has a higher propensity to become an active member of the publisher’s community by registering or subscribing. The social perks may vary, but a more nuanced value point is the sense of reassurance a trusted community gives to newcomers. When faced with a group of folks who share interests and values, all of whom consent to share their data with the publisher, anonymous but engaged users are likely to feel at ease when it comes to sharing their information. As publishers, it’s essential to provide high quality content to draw in leads, but the value of a thriving community to prospective subscribers is just as valuable when seamlessly guiding users toward registered and subscribed states.

Once anonymous users have been drawn in by interest-rich content and/or community, they agree to a value exchange and join the ranks of subscribers. With access to their audience’s first party data (e.g. how much time they spend on site, which pages they view, how they engage with sponsored content, etc.), publishers gain a far better understanding of their audience as individuals and cohorts alike. With this data, publishers need only keep their audience growth strategies and first party data strategies up to date in order to keep optimizing their content and retain registered users while continuing to recruit new subscribers.

Once immersed in the community, formerly anonymous but active engaged users become user generated content (UGC) contributors – another value point for prospects on the outside looking in. These contributors comment often and create posts of their own within the community, typically generating over 41 times more pageviews and 100 times the amount of ad impressions compared to anonymous users. As the numbers demonstrate in the funnel above, engagement improves exponentially as users move further along the registration process. By retaining user interest and engagement, publishers not only get closer to the value exchange moment that earns them subscriptions, but they also reap the rewards of substantial growth in impressions as their audience members move further along the funnel’s stages.

Publishers who understand that the potential to maximize their registration, retention, and revenue lies directly in this value exchange moment are on track to setting themselves up for success. So long as users – anonymous, engaged, or fully subscribed – are benefiting from a continued value exchange for their information, publishers can continuously use that self-replenishing well of information to improve their offerings and win big in both audience loyalty and business growth.

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