The New Era Of Audience Engagement: Evolution, Trends And Strategies

3:00PM Aug 25, 2023

Speakers:

Jill Nicholson

Keywords:

content

traffic

reader

publishers

ai

audience

platform

data

newsletter

facebook

discover

site

behaviors

social

email

decline

engagement

talk

automate

google

All right, everybody. Are we just about ready to get started? Sorry to interrupt all your conversations but just want to welcome you to our session in partnership between Chartbeat and echo box describing the new era in engagement and different behaviors that we have been measuring throughout our various audiences. My name is Jill Nicholson. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer for Chartbeat Inc. I see a lot of familiar faces in this room. So I'm sure a lot of you know Chartbeat but just in case, we're a content analytics platform that was built specifically for news and online content. And we partner with some of the largest news organizations in the world to both build tools that actually fit in with the day to day life of a newsroom. But we also measure almost 10,000 sites around the world and it gives us a wealth of data of how readers are behaving on news websites. So what you're going to be seeing today is some of that data that we've collected on readers, and how it can impact your strategy to not just grow traffic, but to build a loyal relationship with your audience. So your readers get more value from your site and you get more value from your readers. Now I'm joined by my colleague from echo box, and I will let him introduce himself.

Hi, everyone. Hi, I'm Antoine I'm the Founder CEO at aquabox. Pleasure to be here. So we are an AI company. We're based originally from London. But we have staff all around the world. We are around 100 employees. We are we sell two products. One product is it's an AI solution specifically made for social media. Most of the kind of large names within publishing use our services nowadays. And then the other product we sell is a email newsletter solution that also uses artificial intelligence to automate and optimize email newsletters. So we you know, because we work with over 2000 publishers in many countries around the around the globe, we track some really good data on social media and on email from within the publishing industry. And we're going to share with you today some trends that we see within social and within email, and hopefully also give some recommendations that we've also you know, we feel strongly about that might also help you going forwards too. Okay,

amazing. We're gonna let this gentleman deal with the clicker, but while he's doing that, I'll take you guys through the agenda today. So we're going to start with a little bit of Chartbeat on site data and looking at you know how readership and referral sources have changed for apparently that one is forward. Cool. So how is readership change, particularly over the last year and a half? And what do you need to know about those reader behaviors? Then I'll hand it back over to Antoine to talk about engagement with content on social media and with emails. And then in our prep conversations, you know, we are both very big data nerds so we also had a really good discussion kind of looking forward based on those data trends. What are some of the things that we're thinking about? And what are some of the things that we want to work with you on as we try to go out and connect with those audiences? And then last, we'll leave some time for q&a at the end of it, but just in case Yeah, you don't get your question. You can find Antoine at the entrance to the exhibition hall, and you can find me upstairs outside of the main ballroom. So you listen to an up intro, we're ready for some data. Cool. So we're gonna start by looking at weekly traffic across heartbeats network of 10,000 sites. Now again, these are from 74 countries. So these are global patterns. Now, one thing we've been observing particularly this year, is that overall traffic is down about 6.8% year over year. So if you're wondering, is it my site? Is it the world it's the world, however, especially here in North America, we're really starting to get into an election cycle. So in previous years, one of the patterns that we've observed is now is the time where that growth in engagement and readership should start to build leading up to next year's presidential election. But in addition, I think the more important pattern so traffic is great. pageviews are important, but what we really want to focus on is how people are reading. And I think there's also a pattern of people spending less time with your articles. So we check in with readers to see are they really on this page? Are they really interact, interacting, and from the beginning of last year until about mid this year, we did see that the average engagement on articles has dropped from about 30 seconds to 28 seconds. Not the happiest news I can deliver to you but it's a reality that we all need to be thinking about. Instead of just traffic generation, we have to think about duration and experience. Because the unfortunate fact is that 45% of readers that open one of your articles will be gone in fewer than 15 seconds. But by watching the numbers by finding new ways to reorganize your content, add visual elements, really think about experimenting with storytelling. We've seen a lot of success at deepening that engagement and bringing those readers back to your site. So the longer they read, the more pages they view with, the more likely they are to come back. But also their behavior is really going to be dependent on how they discovered that content in the first place. Where you came across that information dictates a lot of your behavior. Once you end up on a news website. So we're going to look at some of the most common sources of traffic and what that has looked like over that time period. So just to make sure we're all using the same nomenclature. Internal means a reader discovering content from within your website, they came through the homepage, they came through another article. It is the largest way that people discover content. It's just moving around within the same site. And internal traffic is actually up a little bit year over year. So one thing we have observed is that readers are visiting more deeply while you have them, which is a good signal that they're starting to internalize the value of a site as a whole and not just a single article. Now search is as a proportion of traffic up year over year. It has been growing as the largest source of external traffic for at least the seven years that I have been doing research based on Chartbeat data. And it is one of the primary ways that readers are discovering content. And I think it goes without saying that most search traffic is coming from Google, but you'd actually be surprised at how much is coming from other sites like Yahoo and Bing. direct traffic is folks who come straight to your homepage or other section fronts or landing pages. So these are folks that know you love you and choose to get their information from a particular outlet. And it's this kind of teal, little Yeah, there we go. This little teal ribbon and I think one of the encouraging things too is that that has been flat year over year. So we're not losing any of those front page readers. They are continuing to stay loyal to the outlets that they're already coming to trust. And again folks asked me you know, how do you turn one of those searchers social readers into a homepage reader? The answer is really simple. Engage them get them onto a second piece of content. It greatly increases the chance that their next visit will come through basically your front door of the homepage. Now I think the biggest change that we've seen is in social so you can see it in that dark blue line. And it has been declining year over year pretty notably, most of the recent declines are actually driven by some moves that Facebook had made. We're actually working on a piece right now. About what Facebook's ban of news in Canada is doing to affect traffic. I can SPOILER ALERT tell you, it's down a lot in Canada, but interestingly, it's also having a pretty measurable effect on us sites that naturally had audience in Canada. So we're going to be watching that situation because we saw when this similar situation happened in Australia, the effect on traffic was really, really dramatic. And it actually changed the way that people used other referral sources so it's not quite ready for publication, but keep an eye out next week shameless plug and then just to kind of round this out external traffic is external traffic from anywhere else. That's from the aggregators like, like Google News, things like Apple news or just other websites that are referring traffic to your site. So I want to take a second and actually break out the two largest sources of traffic because while Facebook is declining, Facebook and Google are still make up almost 75% of external traffic to news websites. So we can see Google's had some ups and downs, but overall has remained particularly steady. Over this past year and a half. Well, Facebook has continued to decline. Now there are a lot of reasons that are living underneath this pattern. And part of it is something we're starting to observe as a really big shift in the way that people interact with social media. We're seeing and Antoine is going to show you even more data about how they're behaving on the platform. We're seeing that there's less interaction with Link posts, and less folks clicking through to the website. That doesn't mean they're spending less time on social media through our sister company tubular which measures social video, we do see that consumption is growing on those platforms. But whereas a lot of the interaction was with text based posts or link posts, the growth is exceedingly happening in terms of video on Facebook on other platforms like Instagram and Tiktok. So there's still a lot of ways to use social to connect with that audience. There's still a lot of value in helping people discover your outlet and get to know you. But as you think about setting your strategy, and particularly your metrics for success, it's good to also set realistic expectations about the mentality of a reader when they're on these platforms. So we'll see more about that just a little bit later. In terms of raw traffic, we do see that year over year, Facebook is down considerably and while Google is down it is down far less than the overall drop drop we observed in traffic. And at this point, if you had asked me last year, I would have said that Facebook or that Google brought in three times as much traffic as Facebook. That multiplier has now reached 4x. So they are four times more likely to discover content via search than they are via social. Now there are a lot of other refers, but again, these two are still so large, even with this decline, that the next closest referrers only drive about a 10th as much traffic. So wild diversification in your traffic sources. And your platform strategy is really, really important. Again, we have to set the right expectations for that platform. Something I always say is you can adapt your content to fit the channel, but you can never adapt the channel to fit your content. So make sure you're really looking at and defining success per platform. So you can understand whether your investment in those platforms is in line with what you can potentially grow from them.

I won't spend too much time on this because I think it's you know, something that everybody is aware of, but the numbers are just really really stark It has been years that mobile has been the majority of traffic globally. 70% of traffic is happening on a phone. Now full disclosure, I spent the first half of my career again at part of it as a producer. So I know that a lot of times when we're packaging content when we're really optimizing, we're looking at a computer, but it still bears repeating that we actually have to be looking at what that experience looks like on a phone. Because unfortunately, the most common behavior on an article on a phone is that you barely wait for the page to load and then you leave the site. So really thinking about the mobile experience, both in terms of how we create and package content, as well as how we partner with our product teams to deliver a seamless and engaging mobile experience is one of the key ways that you can actually increase your audience and the happiness of those readers. Now there's a couple of other patterns that aren't really on this chart but your desktop is still a decent amount of traffic but it is very weekday workday traffic. Right it is very much tied to the nine to five that is true even in a world where not everyone goes into an office. We still see that pattern that we mostly spend the nine to five on our desktop, and the mornings, evenings and weekends are even more mobile. Now I know we have some international folks. And if you're interested you can come up afterwards, because there's some countries in the world where these dichotomies of mobile and desktop are even more stark, up to 80 or 90% of traffic coming from phones. And you can even see that year over year. The growth has all been on mobile and the declines have largely been on desktop. And the last thing I'll point out because someone will usually ask this at the end, you'll see this little blip in the middle. That is the week between Christmas and New Year's. I know it's not a universally celebrated holiday break. But it is something that happens absolutely. Absolutely every year raw traffic drops during that week, but it goes almost exclusively mobile. So as you plan your end of your content, again really think about the fact that no one wants to open up their laptop less they get distracted by their email and really think about those mobile experiences. At chirpy, we also think about visitor frequency How often are you getting readers to your platform to consume this content? So I'll go over the boring definition quickly and then we'll get into the patterns. So at Chartbeat we define a new reader as someone who we are detecting on your site for the first time in 30 days, right they're not a frequent visitor they came for something particular. Most of the time they're coming through search and social or the opposite end. There's a loyal reader and that's someone who comes to your site every other day or more often. And usually when I say that in a newsroom, they say that is a crazy high benchmark for loyalty. Why is it so high? It's actually based on behavioral data. At that threshold behavior on the site starts to change. So loyal readers will read three times as much content per visitor as someone who is coming even slightly less frequently. And again they are much more likely to visit your homepage. In fact, loyal readers in a single day will visit your homepage more often than they will visit an article. So thinking about that frequency can help us curate particular environments like the homepage for those loyal readers who are very familiar with your content, who are looking for and kind of snacking across what they want to hear from you just to keep themselves updated. And then returning is just everybody who's been here more than a month, but not every other day. So over the last year there has been a growth in new audiences so our partner websites are attracting folks who are not habitual newsreaders, but I think it's also been really encouraging that the lion's share of traffic more than 40% in the last few weeks is actually coming from those loyalists. So we are growing and holding that royalty, even in what can be, you know, very large and ongoing news cycles. I know we talk a lot about news fatigue, but there's still a good cohort of people that have that ingrained habit of coming to a site and consuming content. And I want to pause just on one of their furs that we've been spending a lot of time with this year, and that is Google discover. So again, I think most people know what Google discover is but Google discover differs from search. And that search is somebody looking for something specific in the search box. And discover is any Google environment that is curated by an algorithm, so programmatically serving you content in the Google app on mobile Chrome pages, and it's become an increasingly large source of traffic. So you'll see we have recently done a lot of work to be able to differentiate Google discover behavior from search behaviors. And we can now see that almost half of that Google traffic is actually coming from proactively served content that is happening in discover environments. Now, it gives us a chance to go back and look at our SEO best practices because they also help you index well on Discover with the types of content that are being served the egg discover verse search are not always the same thing. So it's a good moment to actually segment your article performance by those two platforms to start understanding, are we creating new content that is likely to resonate with that discover audience while still maintaining kind of that intent driven Google audience that really is looking for something specific from you? So we'll be studying a lot more of Google discover and hope to release more research on that in the coming months. And the last thing I'll say about it is it is not equal. So Asia Pacific sees a much higher proportion of traffic from Discover then other other areas like North America, which typically sees the lowest proportion of traffic from Discover. And again, I'm happy to go through more country specific trends if you stop by and see me after. So that's all the data we're going to show. So just to wrap this up before I hand it over to Antoine at the midpoint of the year, traffic and engagement are declining. But that is very likely to start reversing quickly now that we're having presidential debates now that there's more coverage of candidates and we expect it to rise pretty notably from now. Until November of next year. Though typically that wave starts to decline within days after the actual election result is declared. And these days, I have to say election result is declared and not necessarily election day, because I think we all still are a little triggered by last year's last cycles election. So social is declining. It is still an incredibly important source of traffic. It still drives a lot of traffic, but the behaviors on social platform are starting to change. And now is the moment to rethink your strategy. Set new KPIs for success, and start thinking about it as a way to educate, engage and inform audience and not solely because of the traffic it drives back to site. Again, consume your own content on your phone. See what that experience is like and partner with your product team to make sure that that mobile experience is as seamless on your website, as it is on everything else that lives on my phone. Encouraging traffic from loyal readers is up again. We're building habitual usage by serving quality content and good experiences. But it is a constant constant source of work for our newsrooms don't just think about traffic, think about experience, because that is how you are going to hold on to these audiences and see longer term more sustainable growth for your site. And stay tuned as we can measure more of the pattern term discover traffic and start to differentiate how they're different from search. Readers will be reporting more on that as a grows as a another way to discover traffic. So that is my on site analysis of some of the biggest patterns we've been observing this year. And I am going to hand it over to Antoine to talk about social platforms and email.

Pretty interesting. Thank you. Awesome. So now we're going to talk about social media, specifically Facebook. So one thing we looked at is we looked at what has happened on Facebook within the publishing industry. And we've seen that Facebook traffic has gone down significantly for publishers of the last year. I mean, it's actually gone down nearly 50% across the board. And the main one of the main reasons for this is because you know Facebook has decided to deprioritize news on the platform that's driving this. That may change in the future. It's not the first time this has happened in the past. Facebook also made changes to the algorithm to deprioritize news and then reverse the decision. So it might happen again, right, especially now with it with the election cycle coming up, you know coming about that might also change how things you know, move going forward. The other thing I would say is that, you know, from Facebook's perspective, they can get a lot of data from their users on their platform based on what their users read on their platform. So I wouldn't you know, completely discount the fact that Facebook, they do get some benefit from having publishers on the platform as well. So just bear that in mind that the question isn't, okay, so given that Facebook traffic is going down, what kind of content would resonate on Facebook? So one thing we looked at is we looked at different metrics. And we found that for comments, for instance, comments haven't gone down as much not even closely as much as traffic, which means that comments, shows okay, if you want to produce content, produce content that would engage your audience on Facebook, and that would that content will perform better than if it hadn't been you know, focused on engagements. There are various things you can do one of them is some of our clients what they do is they will start when they post it will stop the first comments you know, you can do that when you post on platforms you add a comment says the first comments on the platform in order to engage the audience. Get them to engage with you as well. That could be one good way of increasing comments as well. Another thing you could also do is think more about the content or what kind of content will increase engagement on the platform not so much just traffic but also engagements. We also looked at the likes as well and likes also show a similar pattern to comments, which again shows that any content that is engaging on platform won't suffer as much from the decline as you know pure traffic driving contents. So some takeaways, and then I'll get to email which I think is also even more interesting in many ways. So first off, don't write off social media, a lot of traffic still comes from social comments and likes aren't declining as much as as traffic. So the task is to think about okay, how do you how do you create content that focuses on getting engagement creates more engagement on platforms? That's what I would think about. The other one is diversifying your social channels. In the past Facebook was quite often treated as the main social channel, you know, and to be fair, it did drive most traffic compared to other channels. But the reality is many social channels today don't actually produce that much traffic, but there's still valuable channels to be on. And I wouldn't think of Facebook as the main, the main traffic channel anymore, or the main social channel, think about okay, how can I diversify? How can I publish my contents in different formats across different social networks, and still really build an engaged audience? And the third point, which I think is the the most important point is to think about how can I reduce my dependence on social media and build my own owned channel through newsletters, right. So in the past, often something that we found is that publishers often think about, okay, how can I get as much traffic as possible from Facebook, right? But in reality right now, the focus should be more about how can I convert as many followers as possible into an email address that I control that I can engage with directly that I can send an email to, and that's kind of the big aim right now is how can you build your own own channels? And that I think is something that everyone should think about? Because we cannot rely on third party platforms, they have different interests. They don't their interests, don't load, we don't align with your interests, and you have to be aware of that. And just too many of us maybe weren't aware of that in the past. And now we have to we have to change. The last point is automation in social media can be automated and you have tools out there that can automate social media really effectively. So one thing to think about is okay, well if my traffic is going up on Facebook, and my ROI is going down, how can I minimize my spend on social networks in order to keep my ROI positive? So I would embrace automation to use tools that reduce your internal resources when put to post on social platforms, and that should hopefully also help you for the foreseeable future. Okay, so now we spoke a bit about email and newsletters, we're going to dig a bit deeper into its so as we all know, newsletters nowadays is kind of one of the big things that publishers are really embracing. It's an it makes sense. It is a way to communicate, you know, with your audience, not being dependent on third party platforms like social or search. Again, the interests aren't aligned to your interests. But if you have an email address, if you have a newsletter campaign, you are in control of what your readers will read. You're not at the behest of algorithms, right? So that's why newsletters are so important. And the other reason why newsletters are important is because it's a way to build a loyal audience. So when you think of often traffic that comes from search or from from social, isn't necessarily social, isn't necessarily low traffic, right? It's, it can be traffic, it just comes and leaves. So what you want to think about is you want to think of a funnel and newsletters are a really effective way to really have kind of one step further down, that funnel away converts convert first time readers that come from various channels into a newsletter reader who becomes a loyal, loyal reader, whom you can then monetize differently in other ways going forward. So one thing we looked at is, you know, open rates across the publishing industry. So these are the averages. When you go online, and you look at, you know, what is the average open rates that aren't really any good metrics, because all the metrics that exist nowadays are like a mix between you know, marketing firms and ecommerce sites and none of which are publishers, right. So, if you go on you know, I think, you know, some companies, they sell too many different types of businesses, and they might publish averages, but those aren't relevance to you guys. So these averages here, they are relevance to publishing. They're just just from publishers across the world. Right now. We're seeing you know, average open rates hovering at about 35%. So if you're above that grades, if you're below, you know, there might be some things you could do to improve. That said, even if you're above there might also be other things you can do to improve as well right because what we found is that these average open rates are quite different from country to country. And they also can be quite different depending on the on the topic matter as well. We found that for instance, you know, open rates for sports content will be higher than open rates for, you know, maybe cultural content as well. So there are these differences too, just to be mindful of. We do publish regular some benchmarking reports on our websites, you know, on icon box.com and those go a lot deeper. Than this as well. So if you're interested, you know, check it out. Now, there are a few things that can impact your open rates. One of them is the sender name. So what is the name from which you send the email from the other is the subject line. The third one is the email contents and the fourth one is the sense time. I'm going to just talk a bit more about center time for now. So one thing we looked at is often what happens is when publishers you know right now send an email campaign. The entire email list will receive the newsletter at the same time, it will be sent at the same time and that is not an optimal way to send a newsletter out because different subscribers have different routines, you know, some like to read the news in the morning, some like to do it over lunch, some maybe in the afternoon, some in the evenings after work when they come home for work, they want to read you know, so sending everything at the same time to everyone just doesn't make any sense that you want to, what you want to do is you want to think about how can I personalize the sense of time to every single subscriber because every single subscriber has a different habits of when they like to read the news. So what we do on our platform, we do that, and it's quite interesting because what we do is we can compare the performance of this per subscriber personalization versus sending everything at the same time. What is kind of done, you know, commonly nowadays using other tools, and we see a 52% increase in open rates and just from personalizing the sent times and it kind of makes sense right? If you send everything right you know, at the same time, it will not be on the top of the inbox for every subscriber when they when they open the inbox. So you want to think about centime personalization in order to increase open rates for emails. The other thing to to check, check out as a sender name as well. So some of our clients what they did, is they A B tested sender name so what they would do is they would send emails using the same sender name. The sender name is basically the from the from name and an email rates. So the question is, you know, would a better from name, you know, leads to higher open rates. And what we found is that as soon as you change the sender name, no matter what you change it to it will lead to a significant decline in open rates. And then if you revert it back to the old sender name, then the decline isn't fully reverse it, it's actually it will stay quite low. So, you know, in our opinion, don't play around with your sender names too much, you know, keep them the same. You know, it's quite important not to change your sender names.

Now, when it comes to click rates, so click rates are, once somebody has opened the email, do they click on contents, right? What we found here is that you know, the average click rates there right now hovering at around 12 13% 14%. And they have actually increased over the past few months, which is quite interesting. And again, here, there's several variables that can impact the click rates. One of them is obviously the industry I mean, the the subject matter and the other one is the country. as well. But then there are some other things like sender name, subject line and send time that can also massively impact your click rates in your emails. One of them is the content ordering, right? So right now when often when you send a newsletter, you'll think about okay, what should be what content should be on the top of the newsletter? What should be on position number two, position number three, you know, how do I position content like that? And that's actually quite important because usually, if you do it well, if you position the right content on position one, you will get far higher click rates and if you position maybe content that didn't, wouldn't drive as many clicks, as position one. So one thing that one can do is one can personalize the content ordering. And what happens there is you pick the contents and then you allow an AI to personalize the ordering of the contents to every single subscriber that takes into account the subscribers interests, and then it makes sure that's the position one of that newsletter will include content that will drive the most clicks for every single subscriber. And when you look at the performance increases of that kind of personalization, it just shows again, a plus 50% increase in click rates if you personalize right and even if you don't personalize but you optimize for the audience as a whole. You will still also see a significant increase as well. So I guess the takeaway here is really think about you know, how can you optimize your your current newsletter campaigns, how can you use AI to personalize things that maybe right now you aren't personalizing? There's a lot of room for improvements just by using AI to help with your news. Okay, now, one big takeaway, I think for everyone here should be is that own channels, like a newsletter channel, that is the future for publishers. The future isn't social media. The future is to own your own audience. And once you own your audience, you can decide what you do with that audience, how you want to communicate with the audience, and you can also convert that audience better and monetize them in better ways. than if you relied solely on third party platforms. The other one is personalizing timing. We spoke about timing, that's something to think about how can I personalize my timing when I send send emails that every single subscriber receives an email at the time at which they opened the inbox and the third one is personalizing contents. We spoke about content ordering as an example. But you can also personalize the actual content selection as well. So from the large pool of content, what content should I be sending to every single subscriber in order to increase the click rates? That's another really important thing to think about as well. So yeah, these are the main takeaways here. Just think about those points. And I think once you do that, you will see significantly higher performance with your email campaigns. Okay, and now this takes us to a conversation so Jill and I will have a conversation about certain important points about the industry. Each of us have our own perspectives, you know, obviously Chartbeat are super interesting echovox as well. So I'm really looking forward to discussing those those points with you. I'm going to sit down as well and then we'll take it from here.

Yeah, and lastly, we'll we'll talk for probably about 10 more minutes and then we will come around with a microphone and kind of ask if there's any other questions or any other data we can clarify for you. So

awesome. One last thing before we before we continue, so we have cupcakes on all tables. Just just for you to know they don't actually give blue teeth I had one this morning. Tastes amazing. And and your teeth My teeth are so white. So and it's all good. It's

great. So you know, one of the things that we talked about in putting this together was kind of the relationship between the data that we're measuring and the behaviors that we are describing and how that actually fits into your monetization strategy. So you know, one of the things that Chartbeat that we're we're thinking and investing a lot in is behaviors that go behind reach beyond readership and get into conversion, right. How do things like engagement with content correlate with propensity to subscribe to register to subscribe to your newsletter to download your app? And I think it's really helping us describe even more complicated human behaviors and journeys that are kind of happening, you know, if all we're describing is a pageview, or even engagement, it's it's pretty straightforward. So I think one thing that has been exciting for me recently and that I'm looking forward to more of this year, is trying to understand, you know, when publishers are thinking about conversion, how exactly are they attributing that kind of monetization value to their content? Right, how are they saying, We believe that this article or this group of articles, this topic, this author, contributed to those really important conversion behaviors? And I think one thing that's been interesting is we've heard a lot that folks are thinking a lot about last click conversion right there. They're really really focused on what was the last thing someone touched before they hit that subscribe button before they hit that newsletter subscription button. And I think one thing that I hope we can talk more about in the next year is actually describing again, the journey because you don't convert based on a single experience with a single article. So how can we understand that kind of full funnel of behavior? What moves someone into a subscription or conversion journey? What was the content that they valued most during that journey? Because if all we're doing is looking at last click, it's a really, really close correlation between what gets pageviews and what gets conversions, because there's just more of an opportunity for that conversion event to happen. So I think one thing that I'm really really looking forward to is talking more about attribution models. And we're actually going to be discussing that with a few of our publishers at one and a different salon. If you're interested in hearing how some other outlets are thinking more robustly about how long that conversion journey is, and how it affects their content strategy. Yeah,

I agree. I think I think Joe you mentioned a really good points on on conversions and a funnel. The quote too often I see you know, clients of ours who maybe think more about how can we monetize through advertising to display advertising, we get this many page views and you know, what is the CPM? How much revenue can we make? And I think it's still important to think that way, but one should also think about the funnel, you know, one should think about okay, how can I convert those audiences? And, you know, move them further down the funnel, and monetize them in different ways. So you know, what one thing to think about is for instance, with newsletters writes, newsletters are simply one other step in that same funnel. And if you do a newsletter strategy writes, then you can you can monetize your audiences on newsletters very differently far beyond ads. Sometimes I see you know, clients of ours who think, Okay, I have let's say, 100,000 subscribers, I send one email a day. I put an ad in my email, that's a CPM and, and in reality, you won't get that much ROI if you just think like that. For newsletters, for instance, because it's further down the funnel, you should think about, okay, how else can I monetize audiences further down the funnel, even though if there was smaller audiences, I can monetize them differently, maybe through promotions or events through, you know, maybe donations or a paywall, so it's very important to think of a funnel and not just think about direct traffic Okay, on on each channel and how much ad revenue does that bring?

I'm sure you've heard a lot about this topic, AI. We've seen it kind of all over all over the agenda. But you know, in terms of AI, I think you know, what's what's been interesting for me to really really think about is is different ways that AI can contribute to the strategies you know, there is the kind of analytical AI that is helping us a break down our content into topics into behaviors into areas that help us again, better understand beyond what are humans in our newsrooms are classifying but I'm really really interested to see how generative AI is going to become more of an assistive tool. So thinking about it as we mind our previous traffic and engagement data for you know, what is the best approach to homepage headlines, what is the best approach to things like send times and subject lines and really looking at, you know, how we can incorporate that tool in the safest possible way? Because well, I think a lot of industries are talking about AI, we're talking about how it may replace jobs. I do think the news industry kind of has a higher calling and how we think about it and are held to a higher standard. So a lot of what we've been talking about at Chartbeat is not just the technicals of how we might implement AI, but actually building like our guardrails for what is our philosophy on using AI? What is the healthiest way to make sure that you know we are being responsible in what we're serving to our customers and what our customers are serving to their audiences? How can we build that system? of checks and balances before it goes out into the world? So you know, while I'm really excited for the stuff that we're like you're building and to actually get into futures, I have been encouraged, you know, throughout this conference, listening to folks really trying to take a holistic and kind of cautious approach, because while AI is moving pretty quickly, it is still pretty nascent. And there are definitely some big philosophical questions that we need to continue to wrestle with before we're safe saying, okay, we can let AI handle more of our processes without the checks and balances of kind of human intervention.

Yeah, I think, you know, from my perspective, when I, when asked you this question, how will AI change the news business and in my view, it has already changed the news business, and it's, it has happened in many years ago. The way I would think about it is you have constant you know, creation and then you have content distribution, right. Once you've created content, you distribute it across different channels. Now, in the content distribution side, I mean, you can already today automates and you have been able to automate using AI various channels really effectively throughout the years and 10 years ago, when when we started echo box, back then, the notion of automation in a newsroom that just didn't exist at the time you know, it was it was kind of a crazy notion that you could ever automates, let's say your social media publishing or you could ever automate your email publishing it just seemed like a crazy notion because it seemed like a very human process that you needed to an editor for. But in reality, you can automate a lot of these things that that has been happening now when many leading publishers nowadays they already automate to using AI, their social publishing the email publishing, so it's already a common thing. What has however changed is the content creation side, okay, not distribution, but creation. This is where open eyes GPT 3.5 has come in and really been a step change in allowing us to think really big about what else can one automates within the company creation science, and I see GPT 3.5 Because 3.5 has been a huge step change compared to 3.0 and 2.0. And I know this because we've integrated with with GPT 2.0. Now for many years, and then we obviously then use three and 3.5 and four, but we saw the changes and it's it is a significant change. And I think that's where I'm going I agree with Gil we have to think about you know the ethics and how to do it safely. Because it is going to be a step change, but if we do it well if we do it safely, and we really kind of, you know, be more efficient with how we create content. It's going to allow us to create much better content, more content, more tailored content, more personalized content, and also drive far more engagement and higher revenues for the industry. So I think it's going to be an amazing thing, but we have to still be careful

All right, I was just doing a quick time check. As you can see, Antoine and I can get a little chatty so I think we've got one more topic and as before, we'll turn the mic over to you all to ask any questions. How can publishers evaluate new technology carefully and and holistically? I do think, you know, there is a wealth of technology out there. You know, we talk about distribution, curation generation, all of those technologies. And I do think, you know, there are a lot of questions that we want our partners to be asking us as they evaluate not just the you know, the technology that we have available today but to help us prioritize the technology that we're building, and really, really thinking about, you know, where really are the pain? What is the pain point you're solving for your organization, for your audience, and to try to prioritize where you're going to invest? In, in bringing in technology, where do you automate and bring in AI? Where do you protect kind of the human bandwidth? You know, as you evaluate things like the data you're using and decision making, again, going beyond just surface level metrics, and really trying to dive into and understand those human behaviors and then kind of choosing the tools that are going to both measure those human behaviors, but also report it back out to your teams in a way that is really going to resonate with what they what they control, I think, you know, with Analytics, you know, people often say we want more data, we want more data, we want more granular data, and you know, what we find is, you know, when we overwhelm folks with the data when we try to just, you know, go too far down that rabbit hole, we lose the sight of the fact that it has to be actionable, right? If you're just looking at data to feel good about how you did that day, it's not really making a change for your audience. It's not making a change for your teams. And so I think one thing to always say when we're going through these tools is how is our behavior going to change based on the tool because that's all technology is it's just something else? In your toolbox. And actually thinking about, you know, is this something people are going to adopt? Is this something that is going to be additive to their workflows? Or is this something that's going to be disruptive? What are things that we're doing repetitively that are maybe less valuable that we could bring in technology to automate? Because I do think you know, kind of protecting the people and their bandwidth and where we prioritize the kind of human work of it all is going to get more and more important as there is more technology for your organization's to choose from.

Yeah, yeah. 100% and I, I've we as a business We obviously work with a lot of publishers who've thought about new technology, you know, ours is would be classified as a very new novel technology. And in my, in my opinion, I think it's important. I mean, let me just take a step back when I look at amongst our clients, you know, who was most successful today when we look at the data we do a lot of, you know, benchmarking ourselves internally. Those publishers who are the most successful are the ones who embrace change and who embrace you know, to the future. And what I would say about how to evaluate new technology, I would say, you know, be open to not just improve an existing workflow with the new technology, but actually take a step back and maybe reimagine something completely different, you know, and it's easier said than done, but it's still important to think about it at least think about, okay, what can this new technology actually really do within my organization? That can give one example so, you know, when you think for instance, about you know, let's say fully automating a newsletter campaign using AI, right? Quite often, what we find is that some publishers, maids you know, when they see this for the first time, they will be amazed by it and be like, Wow, this is incredible. This actually works today. This is amazing. But then the question is, how do I implement it? Well, I have an existing techstack complaints. I have an existing staff structure in place, I have existing workflows, and how is it how's it going to change? And then once you go down that rabbit hole, it's very hard to actually want to embrace the bigger change. So I would just think about tickets step back, think about what would the future look like? Because many publishers are embracing the future. They are adopting our technology and becoming far more efficient and far more performance and how they publish contents. So it's very important not to be left behind, and you won't be left behind if you think if you're open to really changing an existing workflow in full.

That's a wonderful sentiment to end on. embrace change, and let's go into the future together. So that's really what Antoine and I were hoping to cover. We did again, have some other topics planned. But unfortunately, again, we were a little too chatty with the data but a member of our team is going to come around so if you do have any questions that you'd like to ask in the last 10 minutes we have we're happy to have we have somebody down here in front

it works. Hello, I'm totally Radio Free Europe. And in our regions of broadcast, Central, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, there is a high presence of messaging applications like telegram and WhatsApp. And in some cases, this private and public chats they're replacing social media. So in which category of traffic this messaging applications go and very thinking about separating them, as with Google search and discovery from the general mass.

Excellent, excellent question. And something that I also think about a lot so when we say social traffic, we mean both traffic from named platforms like Facebook and Twitter and also organic sharing that's happening in private messaging apps personal email, SMS. So when I show that social data, almost half of that sharing is actually happening privately and organically. Now I wish I could say this is WhatsApp specifically but for privacy reasons they don't declare themselves when someone clicks through that link. But actually enabling that type of sharing is really, really important, especially as we diversify how we what we think of as social. But I think the thing to always keep in mind, is it someone who clicks a link on Facebook and someone who clicks a link on WhatsApp are still going to behave the same way. Once they get to your site. Number one more likely to click on and engage with human or emotional content. Number two, incredibly unlikely to read a second article. And so one of the things that we really, really have to think about is how do we take that research referral source into account when we recommend content on our pages? Right, a search reader is high intent. They wanted to know something specific. We have to stay on topic, but a social reader just got a whatsapp from a friend. Just got an email from their mom. I don't know how often your mom emails you links, but my mom has far too much time on her hands. So you know, there is this like they weren't looking for this topic. It just happened to cause them to have a you know, an emotion and I think in terms of what we do with those social audiences, it's not just bringing them in, it's recirculating them to a second piece of content. Because when you can start to increase that rate, you can increase the chances that again, they're going to start to be more familiar and more loyal to your brand. So how are we using editors to think about socially popular content whether it's dark social and private sharing, or named social from the platform's? And how can we experiment with ways for both our editors and our teams to add links, but also combine that with our product teams, you know, what are we using to power those recommended content widgets, and how much referral and behavioral data are we using to make those selections? Because if you're just recommending something else that was recently published in the same topic or category, you're probably not going to get that get that second click and you're probably going to lose that reader back to WhatsApp. So I think about again, increasing depth of visit from those privately shared social channels, but you are incredibly correct. It is a huge way that humans share and actually build trust in news when it's shared by another trusted source within their even more personal network than, say, your Facebook or your Twitter.

Hi, our newsroom sees just an incredible amount of traffic coming to stories that are picked up by Google discover, but it is of course, a bit of a black box. So just wondering if you had any insights on how

to have we been discover, pick our stories to get serviced? Again, it's an excellent question and we're still digging into it. You know, if you if you go to Google's platforms, like they give you the basic advice, you know, expertise or authority trustworthiness, basic SEO best practices, but that's definitely something I need to dive more into is is actually doing like a content and using kind of language processing to kind of read those those articles that are winning Google discover, to start to try to pull out those themes. I wish I had a good answer for you today. I'll just say hopefully by next Oh, and a maybe that's what we'll pitch a talk to oh and a on is, you know, what's the difference between a straight up Google Reader, a Google news reader and a Google discover reader because the popular topics can differ pretty pretty wildly.

Anybody else? Someone else? Oh, sorry. We'll get to you as well.

Thanks. So you talked about the need to still focus on Google and discover and then there's a lot of talk about personalization. So you've got kind of the mass market on one side, the individual on the other. How do you think about or approach balancing those two seemingly divergent priorities?

I mean, I will let him answer the AI and some of the automation but I think, continue to think of these as people and not numbers. Again, try to think about the human experiences that are behind those. And again, yes, some of it is going to be mass market, getting them to the site with the algorithms with the platforms. And then I do think that like again, using what you can learn about them as people as a mentality, and then using that to power, more personalization on the site is going to be really really key. So I think it is segmentation that is based, you know less on things like demographics and more on things like I am a high intense search reader. And this is what we know about our high intent search readers versus I was kind of more of a lean back, Facebook reader or I am a newsletter reader. So like another thing to think about with the newsletters, again, is not just personalizing the experience within the newsletter, but personalized is the experience they have after they click one of the pieces of content. So I think it's always trying to describe the human behaviors and build real person. You know, in in tech products, we call them personas, right? How can we describe them as humans and think about them as humans? Because again, it really will change the behavior and it will change what you think about success for that reader, it looks like and that's where you can start to have better conversations that take you from, you know, a mass market situation all the way down to the level of personalization that's going to be best for your audience.

I agree. I would also add to this you know, I think, you know, publishing to larger audiences, we maybe don't know who the individual reader is, is still going to be important. For the foreseeable future. I'm gonna with the socialists are going to be a very important channel to to be on right you want to be where audiences are. However, it's very important to think about how can I convert that audience to someone who that I can reach out to one to one, how can I convert that audience to an email address, for instance, right? That's really key. And I think the more you think about that, the more you implement change to allow for that, the more you will be less dependent on third party platforms where these bigger audiences lie that you maybe don't have data for that's what you want to think about thinking about the future and convert as many of those followers and audiences on third party platforms as possible. That should be really a top target right now.

Just a follow that up again, think about what you're asking these people for their personal identifiable information, you know, when you're trying to get that email address, and I think it always It can't be just mechanically about okay, what gets them to click the button, what gets them to click the button? It really is about, you know, have you reached that value moment. So another thing I think a lot about is when do we put that conversion messaging when do we try to capture that first party data that expands it I will give it appeal to everyone in this room as a massive consumer of news. It is my first time on your site, and I didn't even read the first paragraph. I am not subscribing to your newsletter. I love you. It's probably valuable. We might get there eventually. But that's where we have to think about it as human. Yes, that conversion moment is important. But what is my mental state? And is there a case where you know in pushing for these things, got a little thirsty and maybe kind of didn't read the room? Well, so I think that's where, again, first party data is going to be so valuable whether you have a subscription model or not that first party relationship, but I can tell you as somebody who now works in marketing, getting somebody to give up personal information is not is not easy. We've all been taught to be a little wary about who we let into our lives and our inboxes. So really steady, kind of, again, back to that funnel, where have we shown them enough value that we can actually get that first party relationship because it does open up so many more opportunities for personalization to really give them I customize experience that they're going to value in the long term. And I think we have one more question because we are at 1230. And I'm sure a lot of you need both go eat and hit other sections. So one more question.

You highlighted the importance of own platforms a lot today.

I'm curious if you segment the referral traffic between mobile web and owned apps. And if you're seeing any trends in traffic that comes to the mobile apps that's different from what you shared today. So when we talk about mobile that is actually including both like publish your own native apps as well as, as well as mobile web, the behaviors are very different and it's largely because of loyalty. So mobile is still a lot of search and social therefore, they are infrequent visitors to the same site. Whereas obviously the your app audience like they gave you space on their home screen. So I would say that when we look at depth of visit, when we look at engagement per page, is less about native app versus mobile web and more about the loyalty of that reader. How familiar how much of a habit Have you have you built with them? But I will say, you know, again, I haven't done a big study on this, but from the apps that I look at, because I obsessively look at Trophy dashboards, it's a problem. You know, it again, it's app behaviors are often like, again snacky and because of the architecture of an app, again, that that homepage is is incredibly, incredibly important. And one thing we have observed is it especially on phones, you know, this is more of a mobile web observation, but it's my hypothesis is is very true of an of an app homepage. Scroll isn't really as deep as you think it is. So really thinking about how you use those entry points at the top of the page. So on a on mobile web, people only see about the top 25% of your homepage. It is still actually driving more traffic on mobile home pages than you think it is. But I would say you know in looking at that app audience thinking about both curating those really important spots at the top as well as again, depth of visit and recirculation behavior. So they're a little bit the same, but actually kind of different, but I think the turning point is actually more loyalty than environmental. Right.

Thank you, everyone.

Yeah, thank you guys so much. Again, find this after if you want to continue geeking out on the data and have a great last Oh, no, maybe today isn't the last official day but have a great rest of your day.

You see Facebook groups as being in the same category as a great Facebook group. Regardless,

I wouldn't because what you published in the Facebook, he would appear in the newsfeed of the other users newsfeed on Facebook and Facebook controls what people see from the choice. You don't control it. You control what you publish, but control people want to lose so it's still a Facebook owned platform.

Department kind of zero

because you don't know who the user is. And you don't have any data either. You don't get any updates on on who your readers are on Facebook groups. So years ago, Facebook, kind of overcrowd ties to Facebook groups and told everyone this Facebook groups, and then they'll be prioritized and in the meantime many publishers are starting creating communities on Facebook groups instead on instead of email newsletters, right? So Facebook was trying to get that markets, but I wouldn't be smug. Instead of Facebook groups, I would think of email campaigns. That's how I think about this, that you control them. Facebook doesn't control them. So I think one thing that is just as good points

on the outside, also.

I mean, they are there are commenting platforms that we can use on your websites and you can allow people fake communities, but I think Facebook groups you can still use Facebook groups why but I would always think about how can I convert people, and so that should be the aim. I'm not saying don't use stuff or platforms listed on platforms, you will always have to use them use whatever you can from them. But that is the big aim is to convert. The aim is to own right. That's the aim. And I think many, many publishers over the years haven't been thinking about that, that in that way, thinking kind of different thing. But this should be the way I think people should think about because that will make you independent from third party platforms, and it will give you a much better standing in the future. Cool problem. It's gonna say Hi there. Hi.

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Google TV but I will tell you this whole thing, they are everywhere we have built and she question that she has repeatedly said she discovered in we are doing a B test on different types of vertical and so I would love it. I would love to double what is already out there.

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