I spend all my time speaking to online media publishers about the importance of them viewing the front page as a channel on par with Search, Social etc. These discussions keep exposing, as expected, a very similar set of processes being in place for the task of programming the front page. This is a process that is defined by Editors being commissioned with the task of setting the front page to the best of their ability. The objective with which they are to program the front page varies slightly, such as what is most important to what generates the most article views – but the process pretty much stays the same.

It goes like this; Eric arrives at 07:00 in the morning and he’ll start to look at all the original content which is eligible for front page programming and decide what goes where according to the media destinations charter. Dependent on the amount of new content being created and the interest in the current content being presented, he will go reposition the articles on the front page when needed. Some do this every 5 min., some do this 3 times a day only. The same goes for section front pages – same process less effort invested though. Eric Leaves at 15:00 and he’ll hand over the baton to Susan who’ll repeat the same process from 15:00 till 23:00 and Shane will take the shift from 23:00 to 07:00 – and round we go twenty-four-seven.

Let’s do some simple calculus to see how many decisions needs to be taken every single day for the above editor and front page team – on what content to position where.

Here are some conservative constants for the less aggressive publisher:

• 50 New Articles published a day
• 1 Primary Front Page which updates every 1 hour
• 5 Section Front Pages which updated every 2 hours
• 10 Article boxes (positions if you will) are updated in every cycle
• 1 full content refresh every midnight
• Remaining set of Article boxes are updated automatically, based on Time (newest on top)

This leaves Eric and front page team with the task of taking 410 accurate decisions (50+((24+12)*10)) that are fully aligned with the objective of the media property – whilst maximizing the value of the content at the same time. This is a certainly difficult task without any type of front page decision support system in place.

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)