23

May

By Alex Poon
3 comments
Using data and favoring gossip is NOT the same!

One of the questions we get asked quite often is that; how are we going prevent our recommendation engine from filling the page up with Lindsay Lohan stories? As Dennis mentioned in an earlier post, editors can explicitly put in instructions to enforce the editorial tone of the property.  In this post, I decided to look into content recommendations for the front page a bit further to see if gossip stories truly wins out all the time.

Randomly picking a week in April, I looked at all of the recommendations Visual Revenue provided for two of the properties we work with in the daily national news space.  Their stories cover categories like sports, entertainment, local, national, world, politics news etc.

The below two figures show the ten most valuable recommendations for each news property during the week. *The actual recommendations are of course masked to keep our client data confidential.


Only the 9th and 10th most valuable content recommendations are in the gossip category for the US property, and only the 7th, 8th and 9th content recommendations of the European news property are entertainment related. It is worth noting that this is when no editorial instructions are applied.  Gossip and Entertainment do drive a large amount of value, but I think it is important to reaffirm that News and Sports are equally represented in content recommendations, and that this happens without any filters in place.

These two examples are pretty good representations of the distribution we see with our customers in the general news space and as much as conventional wisdom tells us that readers cares only about gossip, I really think the data has spoken.  There is a place in the readers’ hearts for other news categories.

Lindsay Lohan doesn’t always win! ;-)

  • http://tumbleweedmarketinganalytics.com/ Tom Wolfer

    What you say is certainly true about the importance of not just relying on gossip if you are an online media organization in search of content. However, there have been some interesting articles about the impact that gossip on social media such as Twitter and Facebook can have on the ranking of a website in Yahoo! or Google. Perhaps, however, this does not apply as much to a media website as it does to others? Regardless, it is true, an editor must make important decisions regarding which content is worthy of being on their site – not just rely on gossip.

    • http://visualrevenue.com/ Alex Poon

      Hi Tom,

      We are definitely not discounting the importance of the Gossip category. It is popular. It might have an even more special place in social or SEO. Our platform optimizes a media property’s front pages. For front pages, we just want to make clear that optimizing doesn’t equal pushing every piece of gossip content.

  • http://tumbleweedmarketinganalytics.com/ Tom Wolfer

    Well, that is good to hear, as, it is my understanding that gossip columns may be a key driver of constant traffic to media content sites, similar to how an events calendar or a classifieds section can be. Or, having a regular video spot such as is the case on the blog.