Nieman Journalism Lab |
| Readers who still click bookmarks are more loyal customers for news sites than Facebook flybys Posted: 12 Mar 2014 09:01 PM PDT Anyone who runs a website knows it: Not all visitors are the same. A loyal reader who’s bookmarked your site and returns twice a day isn’t the same as a social media flyby who didn’t even catch your site’s name on the trip back to Twitter. And a new study from the Pew Research Center makes it clear that readers who come to your site via different routes act differently once they get there, too. “Facebook and search are critical components for critical components for any news organization's distribution strategy in today's society, and they give you real opportunities to reach new audiences and are critical for bringing eyeballs to any individual story,” Amy Mitchell, Pew Research Center's director of journalism research and the study’s lead author told me. “But what these data suggest is that it's hard to hold relationships with people who are coming through Facebook or coming through search.” Pew found that users who arrive at the 26 news sites studied directly spend about three times as long there as opposed to users who arrive via Facebook or a search engine. (By “directly” the study means arriving by typing in the URL or going to a bookmark — or, technically, with arriving without a referer.) Direct visitors also view about five times as many pages per month and visit a news site about three times as often as users coming from Facebook or search.
“For news outlets particularly that are looking to building a loyal audience, perhaps, and gain revenue from paid subscribers, for example, figuring out how to get those social or search referrals to also come to you directly is critical to their strategy,” Mitchell said. “In this digital realm, strategy in terms of content distribution and in terms of economics may well be tailored to the various spaces within the digital realm and to the various types of audiences that are going to come into contact with your news.” Pew compiled the study by examining three-months’ worth of comScore data for a group of 26 news sites, spanning both pre-web and online-native outlets (from NBC News to BuzzFeed) and including a number of outlets with political leanings (from The Blaze to The Huffington Post). The study was limited in its scope because it only focused on Facebook (not other social platforms like Twitter) and did not analyze mobile traffic since comScore’s mobile panel is smaller than its desktop one. does not collect as much data on mobile usage. Still, Patrick Cooper, NPR’s director of web and engagement, told Pew the desktop findings also held lessons for smartphones and tablets. “The big things publishers should take away from the desktop data, even if desktop is going away, is that: 1) method of entry matters to the experience and 2) they can’t control method of entry,” Cooper told Pew. (One other caveat: “Direct” traffic can mean a lot of different things — anything without a referer, really, not just bookmarks and direct typing. Links in email or chat clients often show up as “direct” in traffic logs, for instance — the looming mystery of “dark social.” Pew acknowledges the category can be fuzzy on the edges.) Despite the limitations on the study, here are three points that stuck out: You’re most likely to only enter a site one wayIf you visit NYTimes.com directly every morning when you get to work to check the latest news, you’re likely not also clicking on that latest Times trend story on monocles in your Facebook News Feed later in the day. Most people who visit these news sites do so only through one of the methods — directly, via Facebook or through a search engine — the Pew study found. The percentage of people who visited a site directly and through Facebook ranged from 0.9 percent to 2.3 percent, with one exception: BuzzFeed, where 11.3 percent of direct visitors also accessed the site through Facebook. And between 1.3 percent and 4.1 percent of direct users also came to a site through a search engine — the one exception being Examiner.com at 8.6 percent. “Looked at another way, for the majority of sites studied (19 of the 26), more than three-quarters of their direct visitors only visited the site directly over the course of a month,” the study found. Engagement vs. sharingIn a talk last month at the Nieman Foundation, BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith emphasized the importance of sharing in BuzzFeed’s editorial strategy. “Each story has a potential audience, and if it's a story about Ukraine or a story about lobbying in D.C., there are maybe tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who might, in an ideal world, share and read that story,” Smith said. “If it's a feature about rebuilding a house in Detroit, there may be millions. If it's a list of cute animals or something that's about a universal human experience, there may be tens of millions. We think: What's the possible audience for this piece? And let's try to hit that whole audience.”
And BuzzFeed’s penchant for sharable content is reflected in the fact that fully half of its desktop traffic comes from Facebook, while only 32 percent of desktop visitors arrive at the site directly. Though the percentage of Facebook referrals outpaces direct visits, users who navigate directly to BuzzFeed content are still more engaged. They average 5.6 minutes per visit and 17.8 pageviews per visit, compared to 2.3 minutes per visit and 2.7 pageviews per visit for Facebook referrals. “Their Facebook engagement numbers were higher than the average and we also saw a greater percentage of their audience that was coming to their site both through direct and through a Facebook referral,” Mitchell said of BuzzFeed. “So it's suggesting that people are finding them in both of these pathways as opposed to just one, which is what we saw for a lot of the other sites.” Contrast that with The New York Times, which sells and increasingly relies on revenue from digital subscriptions. It wants to see higher levels of engagement to support that subscription business. In all, 38 percent of its traffic comes from direct visitors ,who spend an average of more than 9 minutes on the site per visit. A relatively minor 7 percent of its traffic comes from Facebook. “There are only about one-third of Facebook users that follow a news organization or an individual journalist,” Mitchell said. “So those referrals are often coming from friends who are passing along links to news stories. So that might be giving you a different mix of outlets then those that you have on top of mind to turn to to find out about a particular event, or just to get your news fill for the day.” Even direct visitors have varying degrees of engagementWhile referrals from Facebook and search engines consistently have low levels of engagement across a vast majority of the sites in the study, there is a varying range of levels of engagement among direct visitors:
|
| Like a phoenix from the ashes: How some local reporters are sticking it out post-Patch Posted: 12 Mar 2014 08:50 AM PDT Wealthy, suburban, outer-metro areas have always been financial strongholds for local journalism. That’s why, back in 2009 when Patch launched, they seeded the network with sites in the New York suburbs of Connecticut and New Jersey. It’s also why local news reporters in that region who found themselves unemployed after after Patch came crashing down aren’t all throwing in the towel. Kenny Katzgrau is the cofounder of Broadstreet, a New Jersey-based company that builds ad platforms for local news organizations. Before founding Broadstreet in 2012, Katzgrau worked on a media exchange at Yahoo; his partner, John Crepezzi, was the lead engineer at Patch. “After the first layoffs, we realized things weren’t going very well with Patch, and it would make a lot of sense to capitalize on this,” says Katzgrau. “As soon as the layoffs were announced, we basically had scraped all the Patch emails ahead of time. On the day, we sent everyone at Patch an email that basically said, ‘We’re obviously sorry for the bad news, but if you’re thinking about going independent, we can make that really easy for you.’”
“Setting up a site with ads — having the carousel and SEO optimization — is usually a hurdle that it takes a publisher two years to get over,” says Katzgrau. “We wanted to build it all into one theme so they could get started in a few days.”
Michael Dinan was a Patch employee in New Canaan, Connecticut. Now he runs the New Canaanite with his brother Terry using Blargo. “Immediately after the layoff, we all heard from groups and companies that had ready platforms, wanted to help us navigate the next steps, and so on,” wrote Dinan in an email.
“When Patch closed down, and we knew it was coming, we thought we were in a good position to convert a lot of those people,” says NJ News Commons director Debbie Galant. “Some of those people are very beloved in their towns. They don’t know how to sell — that was never part of their job — but we’re going to help teach them what they need to know.” What do they need to know? First and foremost, Galant says, that continuing without the corporate support of Patch may not be for everyone. “A lot of it depends on your life situation and how much risk you can take,” she says. “The sites that do well are usually a family team. With one person selling ads and one person doing the reporting, you can make close to $250,000.” (It’s not for everyone. At least one former Patch journalist I spoke with said the years they spent at the company were simply too exhausting to make a return to journalism seem appealing.) Galant offers a wealth of resources to local news sites through the NJ News Commons. In addition to the microgrants, members of the Grow & Strengthen program will have regular business consulting sessions with Maine media veteran Joe Michaud as well as access to NJ News Commons training sessions, peer mentoring and other programming, including an upcoming conference on municipal data. It was at an NJ News Commons session for recently laid off Patch people that The New Canaanite’s Dinan met the Blargo team, and made the decision to stay in the journalism game. “I sort of feel like there are tools available to people like me, people who want to make a go of this — Blargo is a good example — as well as advice and tech support through groups on Facebook and elsewhere, that either didn’t exist or weren’t as robust, informative, or widely used at the time many of us started at Patch,” Dinan writes. “So I’m re-entering a different world here than the one I left when I started at Patch in July 2010.” Not that making that leap is easy. Galant and Dinan agree it’s essential to act quickly in moving the local audience many Patch employees built in their neighborhoods to a new platform.
Dinan says he’s confident of his audience’s loyalty. “When I’m writing pretty much anything, I am writing as someone who is sort of ‘of the town,’ and it’s an unforced, relaxed thing that I think resonated with readers a year ago and resonated with them now, just on a different site,” he says. But from a financial standpoint, it was important to his business to make the platform switch as quickly and seamlessly as possible. “I did it quickly not just because I work fast but because I had to: I needed to make sure that I didn’t end up with absolutely no savings or severance in the bank and was forced to take a job that would pull me away from reporting the news and meeting my business goals,” he writes. The New Canaanite sent out its first tweet two days after the Patch layoffs were made public: At the end of the day, people like Dinan are still reliant on ad sales to put money in the bank. Although Broadstreet does employ one salesperson for the Blargo network, that’s not their main focus. “Broadstreet doesn’t want to do the sales — we just want to be the platform,” says Katzgrau. This puts them in a slightly different category from local ad networks that want to facilitate the sale of hyperlocal publisher inventory. Instead, Broadstreet wants publishers to do the selling largely on their own, and, in exchange for making that process smoother, earn a 20 percent commission.
“We know that we need to develop more sales people in New Jersey, generally,” she says. “We have to teach people more things very specifically, like how to make ad kits.” The ambitious, scale-hunting Patch of a couple years back may be history, but that doesn’t mean all of the groundwork it laid has to turn to dust. “Patch was a great training ground for me, not just in terms of the tools I use to report the news and present it to an online audience, but also in terms of multitasking and innovating on-the-fly,” writes Dinan. “I don’t mean this disrespectfully to newspapers…[but] I don’t know how many print reporters, two days after a newsroom layoff, would launch their own news website confident that with planning and hard work, it would grow into their full-time job.” Image of Jeff Jarvis addressing a recent NJ News Commons training session courtesy Debra Galant. |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Nieman Journalism Lab To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |