March 21, 2012
Does binging on junk news help traffic AND journalists? Gawker experiment
Gawker.com—known for blatantly traffic-pandering headlines like Little Girl Slaps Mom with Piece of Pizza, Saves Life, and for burning out good writers—tried an experiment in January: Each day over a two-week period, a different staff writer was assigned to focus on posting only items that would garner the most traffic. This left the rest of the staff to “spend time on more substantive stories they may have neglected.” This week Nieman Journalism Lab published an analysis of how Gawker’s pageview-bait turn-taking experiment affected the site’s traffic and staff—and how their more serious journalism fared. It’s oddly good news…
Since Gawker publishes traffic statistics for every story, Andrew Phelps of Nieman Lab analyzed the gawker data. In his post, I can’t stop reading this analysis of Gawker’s editorial strategy, he found that:
- Lighter posting load on most days. “On their assigned pageview-duty days, Gawker writers produced a cumulative 72 posts—about 14 posts per writer per day. On their off-duty days (and remember, each had four off days for every ‘on’ day) the same writers cumulatively produced 34, or about 1.3 posts per writer per day.”
- Regular (non-pageview-bait) posts drew slightly higher traffic. “Those 72 pageview-duty posts produced a combined 3,956,977 pageviews (as of the days I captured data), a mean of 54,958 pageviews per post. The 34 off-duty posts produced 2,037,263 pageviews, a mean of 59,920 pageviews per post. That’s higher, but only marginally so—hardly the stuff statistical significance is made of.”
- pageview-bait draws more new visitors, but big-brand advertisers may prefer more solid content. “Pageview-duty posts that week attracted 703,476 new visitors (people who viewed a post that had never visited Gawker before, or at least who didn’t have a cookie set). That’s 9,770 per post. Off-duty posts attracted 289,996 new visitors altogether, or 8,529 per post. The key to the balance probably doesn’t lie in raw numbers, though. A Gawker that was only weird Chinese goats would likely, over time, bore its readers. The more substantive stories serve as tentpoles for the entire site; once in a while, they’ll blow up huge, and they’re probably more appealing to the kind of brand advertisers Gawker seeks.”
- Focusing on pageview-bait only on some days makes writers happier. Phelps cited several quotes from Gawker writers and editors about how much they prefer working under this system—which is one reason why Gawker has adopted the approach as an ongoing process.
Phelps observed: “Do those data points mean we’ll start seeing less What Time Does The Super Bowl Start? [posts on Gawker]? No. But we might see a few more like Hamilton Nolan’s 3,800-word exposé on journalism junkets in Las Vegas, too. That piece, posted during the first-week experiment on a day when Nolan wasn’t chasing eyeballs, has attracted 30,242 pageviews as of this writing. Not a slam dunk; pretty good, but still 20,000 pageviews below average for the period. That interplay of short-and-long, cheap-and-expensive, aggregated-and-original is something lots of outlets—from web-native sites to The New York Times—are trying to figure out.”
U.K. journalism educator Paul Bradshaw noted: “This isn’t a lesson in quality over quantity, or substance trumping junk. It’s about how the two work together—and not just in a commercial way, but with regard to team management as well.”
The News for Digital Journalists blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
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