July 6, 2012

DDN Wednesdays: When to Reintroduce a Story to the Top Position

We’re back this week with a discussion on the reintroduction of an article into a position (on the homepage) it has already occupied. This is something we often get asked by editors. What do you think? Would you reintroduce an article into the Hero position if it’s been there already? If not, why not?

Also, as we said last week, if you’d like to have us address a question or topic do email us on ddnw@visualrevenue.com and follow us on Twitter (#ddnw)

When to Reintroduce a Story to the Top Position (Homepage)

This week we discuss the conundrum of reintroducing a story into either the top position of a Homepage/Section Front page or a position that it has previously occupied. Does this kill the illusion of Homepage freshness or is there an upside?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx6OIdJPLCQ

http://twitter.com/DennisMortensen Dennis R. Mortensen

Question from LinkedIn:

GLENN: “definitely kills it for loyal readers. WHY would you re-introduce it to the top??”

DENNIS: The reason why one would resurface a story depends very much on the publishers overall objective with the news property. If your objective is as simple as to maximize a metric like Article Views, then data certainly supports the idea of reintroduction – good content is simply killed too quickly in a traditional waterfall model.

If the news property’s loyal reader’s account for the majority of the Article Views and that readers visit the site multiple times during the day**, recommendations to resurface content on top will potentially happen less often, but certainly occur often enough to justify the practice.

In the likely scenario that the objective is more sophisticated than just simple article views, the above tend to stay true – or this is at least what we see from a data point of view.

**On a secondary note, Nielsen at one point defined a loyal reader (heavy reader) as one who visited the site more than 20 times during a month. I urge people to go do that simple segmentation of heavy readers as I think you’ll see that this is a smaller number than expected. Here’s a quick stat from a 66,000,000 Unique Visitors a month news property and customer of ours, where we only see 247,000 readers visit the News Property more than 20 times during the month. They consume as massive amount of content of course, and are super valuable, and a segment I would absolutely agree to cater to them as much as possible.