Tag: engagement

A Closer Look at the True Cost of Open-Source Technology

When it comes to building a new tool for your digital properties in-house, there’s a lot to get excited about: like customization opportunities and the chance for your developers to put together their next masterful creation. But building a tool from scratch — especially a tool that exists to engage and grow your digital community — isn’t a simple walk in the park… even with the help of open-source code.  

The truth is, there’s a whole range of responsibilities that go into building and maintaining a community management tool aside from just integrating free code into your platform. The digital landscape is constantly shifting, which means that whatever is implemented needs to be adjusted every so often to respond to new technical limitations and best practices.  

If you’re currently deciding whether to build your own community management tool using open-source code, we’ve broken down exactly what goes into building and maintaining it:

High demand on your technical team

Open-source code is free to use. However, there are plenty of hidden costs that need to be considered.

“It isn’t free if half of your team is working on integrating it,” says Eric Liang, Viafoura’s director of Engineering. “Your team will need to spend time customizing it for your properties, your tech stack, your analytics and ensure a smooth integration. Or, you may want to hire a team to integrate it for you, which means you’ll need the budget for it.”

According to Soltech, a company that creates custom software and support for businesses, “most custom enterprise software projects fall somewhere between the $75,000 and $750,000 mark to design, develop and implement.”

Quality matters. In other words, your community management tool needs to be customized, maintained and optimized for different amounts of web traffic. Before you begin building onto an open-source tool, plan out the amount of time, staff and skill needed for the entire process.  

The importance of first-party data

There’s a good reason why it’s important that your tools deliver first-party data to clients. The more data you have from your platform’s visitors, the more you’ll come to understand their behaviors and the types of content they like to consume.

In addition, Deloitte found that “the best-in-class companies successfully use audience data to drive revenue, and record market-leading financial performance.”

One of the perks to using a software as a service (SaaS) solution is that many of them use APIs – tools for building and integrating software components – to give you access to your first-party data in a secure way. This data can then be analyzed to determine how users are interacting with your brand, content and other users.

If you’re planning to take on an open-source community engagement tool, you’re going to need a way to access that data. You may want to implement several open-source tools or build a custom solution to do so and then figure out where to store the data.

Ultimately, any knowledge you can get about your brand’s community is power, especially in the digital world. 

An article from MediaPost even states that “91% of people are more likely to shop with brands providing them with relevant recommendations and experiences.”

Are you ready to put thousands of hours into support?

In order to host a new tool on your domain, and maintain positive user experience, there must be a plan in place for regular updates and support.

“We have highly skilled team members monitoring and maintaining infrastructure, fixing bugs, working with customers, and testing regressions between 5000 and 6000 hours a year,” Liang explains. “By providing round-the-clock support for our customers, their communities cannot be overlooked.”

While it may not be feasible to sacrifice so much of your team and company’s time to support your own tool, be sure to have preventative measures in place to deal with bugs and respond to customers. Without long-term support, you could be left with frustrated users who feel abandoned by your company if your system ever breaks.  

Moderation is a must

As soon as you open your digital properties to commenting and live chat or blogging tools, you’re going to have to mitigate a few major obstacles: spam, political influencers, trolls and any other type of toxic comments.

It’s important to keep social interactions as civil as possible. That way, you can provide a safe environment for visitors to engage with on your domains. Whether you decide to use a third-party moderator or task your own team with monitoring the flood of daily comments is up to you.

Consider investing in intelligent moderation services to save your business time and focus on what you truly excel at: building out great content.  

A backup plan is always required

When you rely on free tools or plugins to manage your community, it’s worth making sure you have a backup plan… just in case it ever fails.

According to reports earlier this year, even Facebook’s popular commenting plugin failed iOS users.

It just goes to show that if you’re building out a community management tool, there’s no such thing as a quality shortcut. Although open-source tools are helpful to a certain extent, putting in that short-term and long-term legwork is essential to its success.

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 Athletic’s Commitment to Engagement is Attracting Investors and Readers to its Ad-Free Publications

If you’re a diehard sports fan, you’ve probably at least heard about The Athletic by now.

Those who have subscribed for U.S. $3 to $4 per month have discovered a rich trove of city-based sports coverage that has begun to fill the void left by the dwindling number of newspapers that historically provided a daily sports fix.

Since going live in January 2016, The Athletic has expanded to 47 cities in Canada and the U.S. It’s also diversified beyond written online stories with podcasts and video products — all without a single dollar of ad revenue. Investors have taken note, likely enticed by the strong and growing community The Athletic has engaged.

The Shifting Sports Media Landscape

The company earned headlines from the get-go when it announced the U.S. $2.3 million in seed funding that its founders Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann had landed. Then again for its gradual recruitment of top-tier sports journalists from older, more established companies like Sports Illustrated and The Globe and Mail (both of which have seen their sports pages reduced in recent years).

Traditional media’s shrinking page count doesn’t mean there’s no competition for The Athletic. Established broadcasters such as ESPN, TSN and theScore carry big-time brand recognition online, and more sprawling media brands, like MSN and Yahoo, offer free sports content through various platforms.

James Mirtle, editor-in-chief of The Athletic Canada, says The Athletic’s stories gather “a different slice” of sports fandom compared to other media companies. “We’re doing something more analytical than what you’d do at a free website. You can tell because the comment section is usually more civil,” he says.

Those readers are regularly engaged through means that most will find familiar in 2019 — each reporter is active on social media (table stakes in modern journalism). But The Athletic has also formalized a Q&A regimen that regularly invites subscribers to connect with its experts.

“Initially, it was ad hoc,” says Taylor Patterson, director of communications at The Athletic. “A writer and editor would tackle a live Q&A for an hour, with the editor fielding the questions and the writer responding in real-time.”

But the company soon invested in expanding the in-house tool its product engineers built to facilitate this discussion, improving the UI and making it look “more professional,” Patterson says. The marketing team also hired a full-time community manager to oversee Q&As and build a calendar to coincide with season starts, playoffs, and other chat-worthy events.

The discussions are now a fleshed-out editorial program that averages 15 discussions each week across the network.

Active Subscribers = Retention

Mirtle says that the company has found that when “subscribers are active, taking part in the Q&As and the comment section, they’re much less likely to cancel their subscription. So we’re really invested in that.” Patterson also explains that approximately 80% of the subscriptions that come due each year are getting renewed.

The Athletic crested the 100,000-subscriber mark in 2018. At that time, industry watchers did some quick, back-of-the-envelope math and estimated average annual subscriber revenues between U.S. $6 million and $8 million.

It’s also worth noting that in the 12 months since breaking 100,000 subs, The Athletic has expanded to a dozen new markets to offer local coverage on every team in the NBA, NFL, and NHL and has added NASCAR to its mix.

Even if that revenue doesn’t cover costs yet, investors have not been hiding their checkbooks. Investment and funding information platform Crunchbase pegged The Athletic’s total funding (so far) at U.S. $89.5 million following its sixth round in May 2019. Whatever data those investors are seeing, it’s keeping their wallets open.

Overall, the company is confident that regular engagement with its passionate readers is the key to growth. As Patterson puts it, “when people feel they can connect on a personal level with something they read about every day — and can express their opinions on the topic — people are inclined to stick with it.”

Want a Higher Reader Retention Rate? Look to Your Commenting Section

How do you get readers to stay on your site longer, read more articles and engage with your digital community?

Earlier this year, we did a deep dive into three months of anonymous, aggregate data from our media partners. The goal was to learn — and share — insights around how reader activity in comment sections has an impact on visitor retention and engagement.

In our data dive, we looked at over two billion pageviews on publisher pages in the first quarter of this year. We learned that readers who were logged into Viafoura spent over two million hours on customer domains and 565,595 hours in comment sections.  

We then compared logged-in users to those who were not in order to identify how their behavior differed. The findings:

We also looked at how audiences engage with others when logged in. In analyzing nearly 2.5 million actions on more than 430,000 comments, we discovered that people are a little nicer than you might initially think: 

Our findings illustrate that comment sections allow for civil, real-time conversations, creating a highly engaged community of authors, readers and influencers. These individuals can then turn into paying subscribers if your website is properly moderated. In other words, real-time commenting enhances audience engagement, which can build reader loyalty in your brand’s online community. 

Through our suite of products, our partners can access first-party data for real-time commenting behavior, content consumption habits and more. This allows our customers to measure the impact engagement has on brand loyalty, and drive meaningful business value.

Request a demo to learn how Viafoura can help your organization build an engaged community.

A Socially Engaged News Network That Doesn’t Depend on Social Media

Over the past decade, the ubiquitous and overwhelming phenomenon that is social media has rocked the world of traditional journalism to its core. A reporter today who isn’t on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat is something of a dinosaur.

Catherine Badalamente knows better than most about just how profound the changes have been. She’s spent the last six years as the vice president of Digital Media at Graham Media. The company operates seven award-winning television stations and associated online media hubs in Houston, Detroit, San Antonio, Jacksonville (FL) and Orlando. It has been recognized within the industry as a news leader in digital media and technology development.

Badalamente has worked hard to embrace new, interactive technologies in an effort to make Graham Media a prime resource for the local communities it serves. With year-to-year growth of 29% in daily average users over the past five months, it seems that hard work is paying off.

Using Social to Get People off of Social — and onto Graham Media

Badalamente admits that social media engagement is a key piece of the puzzle for Graham Media — but it’s not the only piece. Rather than the final goal, Badalamente sees social media engagement as a tool to drive readers to the company’s own platforms.

“We can’t control our content on social media,” says Badalamente. She explains that tech giants like Facebook or Instagram can change their algorithms on a whim. Media companies, like Graham Media, optimize content to get maximum exposure considering the social network’s algorithms, and when something changes, the content may not be seen by as many viewers.

“It can be dangerous to put too much energy into platforms that make decisions about how our content is exposed,” says Badalamente. “Instead, we’re using social media to direct users back to us.”

An Interactive Plan in Action

Graham Media’s KPRC Channel 2 in Houston recently put this strategy into action while covering the story of missing four-year-old Maleah Davis. A KPRC reporter used a Viafoura live question-and-answer widget to ask the public for questions about the case, and then answered those questions in real time.

“I followed it live from Detroit, and it was so compelling because the audience asked amazing questions,” says Badalamente. The network then advertised through social media that the questions and answers would be reported that night on the evening news.

“It was real and interactive,” Badalamente added.

And most importantly, it directed viewership back to Graham Media’s own platform — the evening news. It’s one part of a larger strategy that Badalamente says is responsible for the 34% increase in digital revenue Graham Media experienced in 2018.

Created by an Algorithm, Driven by the Community

Making the news interactive is another key component of Badalamente’s plan to make Graham Media the first place its communities turn to for hyperlocal coverage — before social media.

“People aren’t satisfied with simply consuming the news,” says Badalamente. “They have an expectation that they will be contributing to the conversation.”

To create a venue for these conversations, Badalamente is targeting what she describes as “communities of interest.” A community of interest could be a geographical location like a neighbourhood, or a local hero – Aretha Franklin in Detroit, for example – or even a simply hobby like fishing. Graham Media uses a specially-designed aggregation tool that monitors internet traffic for topics that are of interest to the local community served by a particular television station.

When the tool finds a topic that is generating traffic in a particular community, it automatically generates a page on the relevant station’s website. It then gathers content on that subject both from within Graham Media’s platforms and from the internet at large and fills the auto-generated page with the latest relevant news on that topic.

The specialized aggregation tool has only been running for a year, but Badalamente is already seeing results. Graham Media app downloads increased by 19.6% over the past month to 131,254 downloads, and auto-generated pages have begun popping up in the networks’ most-viewed sections.

“No one is lifting a finger,” says Badalamente. “It’s very exciting.”

Now that the system is in place, it’s time to take the next step. Graham Media will search for local individuals who are heavily invested in a particular community of interest, and will make them facilitators who can help organize and share a page’s content.

“How can we build a passionate, invested audience?” Asks Badalamente. “By becoming a gateway to information for the community.”

With Badalamente at the helm, Graham Media is doing just that. The user base is growing, and with it, the company’s bottom line – year-to-year revenue is up 39%.

The Connection Between Human Habit and Brand Loyalty

Naturally, humans are creatures of habit. We visit the same restaurants, stick to the same daily commute and speak to the same people on a regular basis. According to a recent report developed by Hootsuite, people spend an average of two and a half hours on social media each day, browsing the same feeds and reacting to the same media brands.  

So what exactly does this have to do with your company’s website? To put the answer simply: shaping those repetitive user behaviors on your site can help your brand build a loyal online community.  

NiemLab published an article detailing how to turn subscribers into loyal followers based on their habits. In the article, NiemLab outlines how The Wall Street Journal tracked the actions of new members during the first 100 days after subscribing, and then used the data to create an engagement strategy that would improve retention rates.  

“We know that publishers are focused on habit formation,” explains Dan Seaman, Viafoura’s product director for engagement tools. “All the definitions of loyalty are starting to converge around habit signals. A company’s website engagement strategy should be adjusted based on those behaviors.” 

Loyalty is fueled by habit. This means that in order to convert website visitors and subscribers to loyal brand followers, each company must create a unique strategy to improve user engagement habits.  

The Wall Street Journal also found that the top trends in retention were driven by habits: repeated visits to a website section, reading regularly-published content and interacting with more passive media like video. 

To help kick off your own company’s retention strategy, our engagement specialists suggest following a few best practices:  

Gather as much raw data as possible

Before you can begin suggesting new ways to engage and re-engage website visitors, you need to have a thorough understanding of their regular behaviors.  

To do so, be sure you have a way to gather raw data — in a secure, lawful way — resulting from every onsite action, including subscriptions, app or information downloads and other forms of website engagement. You can then analyze your data to gain valuable information on the habits of your company’s online community.  

Maximize the opportunity for interaction

“It’s not just newsletters and content itself that drives loyalty,” states Seaman. “It turns out that there’s a broad range of actions people take and habits they form that contribute to retention.” 

In other words, it’s important to serve up plenty of tools and features right on your website to engage your online community over and over again.  

As Viafoura’s product manager, Mehrad Karamlou, explains, one of the key takeaways from The Wall Street Journal’s study is that “the first 100 days after a person’s first interaction with your company is your opportunity to re-engage them.”  

Give your website visitors the opportunity to interact with your company in multiple ways during that impressionable period. After all, boosting engagement is a great way to boost retention.  

Include a social layer on your site

Adding a safe and well-managed social layer to your website, where users can share information with one another, is a great way to encourage ongoing interactions from visitors.  

Tools that enable meaningful conversations include real-time chat, live blogging & commenting, site-wide moderation, community management and push notifications. They help to ensure that people interacting on your owned and operated digital properties are forming meaningful connections with your brand.

At the end of the day, every brand is completely different and will need to create a unique strategy to build loyal visitors.

Your Guide to Building and Engaging an Online Community

Your company has decided to implement a suite of engagement tools for its website. Exciting, right?

To help you navigate the realm of digital engagement and ease you into working with commenting sections, we’ve put together a helpful guide of trusted tips and industry best practices.

*Keep in mind, it is important to understand what sets a community apart from an ordinary audience within an online space.

Before we jump in, let’s talk about engaging an online community. Anyone working with digital channels probably hears the word “engagement” a lot. So, what exactly is it? Some define it as a goal. Think number of followers, likes and shares you receive from tweeting out one article versus another.

But engagement is more than a metric. According to Viafoura’s product director, Daniel Seaman, it is the “expression of appreciation by your audience for the content and experiences that you are providing them.”

Gone are the days of traditional one-way interactions with audiences. These days, it is absolutely vital for brands to create positive, two-way relationships with website visitors. Ignoring your community is a great way to lose trust, content consumption and revenue.

As brand representatives, here’s how to ensure the work you are creating is not only speaking to your online community, but also encouraging website visitors to interact with your company.

The value of engagement

After gathering data from over 85 million non-registered and 2.5 million registered Viafoura users (see the chart below), we were able to conclude that registered users are more invested in the content they consume.

These individuals want to be a part of the community by interacting with others, sharing content, and opting in for real-time updates. It is also clear that the more opportunities there are to engage with a media outlet, the higher number of users there will be who are interested in registering.

In other words, an engaged and optimized digital community will lead to more website registrations and, therefore, more revenue for your company.

Per user per week Sitewide Pageviews Attention Time per visist (mins)
Registered Users* 52 98
Non-Registered Users** 4 5
Average Lift 14x 23x

Data collected Jan 2019 – May 2019
*sampled 14 unique media brands
**sampled 85M unique non-registered and 2.5M registered users

Commenting makes a difference

For the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the commenting feature is critical to its vision: giving Canadians a place to discuss their opinions. Jack Nagler, the director of journalistic public accountability and engagement at CBC, explains how commenting has helped them become a better newsroom because their readers improve the stories being told. CBC also found in a survey that 70 percent of respondents said that comments were important to them and spent at least 15 percent of their time onsite just reading comments. 

In addition, Carrie Lysenko, the head of digital at Pelmorex Media — which owns The Weather Network — says that when they tested turning off comments, there was a significant drop in pageviews and attention time. Online commenting in a safe and moderated space is, after all, a great way to drive engagement with your brand.

Getting involved

We’ve all seen it. A comment section that quickly turns into a volatile, troll-infested mess of rude comments that go against the community guidelines and has nothing to do with the article resting above it. Anyone would be happy to sit at the sidelines and read in horror instead of engaging with a troll.

But guess what? Getting involved with your brand has actually been proven to help keep the comment section relevant and civil. In a study conducted by The Engaging News Project, when the reporter interacted in the comment section of their article, the chances of an uncivil comment dropped by 15 percent.

As engagement specialists, we know how trolling can be a major deterrent for getting involved in the comment section, or enable one at all. But luckily, Viafoura can automatically moderate inappropriate and offensive comments, keeping your digital community clean and safe. Get in touch with us here for more information.

 

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.

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