The main thing you need to know from the new book on the media on the Internet
The book "How new media changed journalism: 2012-2016" about what happens with editors, readers and information in digital.
The book was published last week in the publishing house of the Humanitarian University. The authors are media experts, university professors, journalists. Among foreign authors, for example, Michael Parks, Pulitzer Prize winner, former editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times, and Manuel Castells, the most famous theorist of the information society.
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We quoted the most important thing to know and divided the quotes into 5 topics:
The main sources of traffic for digital media were social networks, search and marketing (exchange networks, buying traffic) - they all lead the user straight to the material page.
Two years ago, The New York Times, in its Innovation Report, stated the death of the classical information consumption scheme: “Traffic to the main page drops every year, month after month. The traffic to the main pages of the headings is insignificant. ” In this case, the total traffic on the site The New York Times does not fall. Simply, people began to enter through the “other door” - through search and social networks.
The performance of the audience that reaches the news sites from search engines is not very high. Sessions are usually short, and their depth is small. Focus groups demonstrate that both the first and repeated contacts of the user with the resource are characterized by "teflon", a low degree of brand recognition.
The search query involves interaction - the answer. The closer to the request will be the answer, the more likely that it will satisfy the user. In this case, the request (and the answer to it) is not necessarily relevant.
Syntactically, the title of such material matches or is close to the search query. Often it begins with the words “how”, “why”, “what” and briefly answers the question asked. Some publications, such as the foreign Lifehacker.com and the Russian, have built a key part of their business, generating just such materials. They can, for example, explain how to watch the Super Bowl for free without a cable network or give the user an idea of ​​a gift for February 14 (Valentine's Day).
Many Russian publications receive over 20% of the audience from news aggregators. This is such an important source that sometimes a small department appears in the newsroom, generating news for aggregation sites. Usually we are talking about frequently changing short news, in the headlines of which actual newsmakers are mentioned, and the text is compiled from several sources included in the news cluster.
Transitions from Yandex.News, Google News, Rambler, Mail.Ru News in Russia, as a rule, occupy a place in the top three or five sources.
The effectiveness of the behavior of users who have switched to news sites from news aggregators is extremely low: the viewing depth is 1-1.7 pages, the session time is less than a minute. Indirectly, one can also speak of a low degree of conversion into the core for users who are in contact with a news resource in this way.
Unlike traffic from news aggregators, transitions from social networks are fruitful, and the audience shows high efficiency of work on the site or in its mobile version - both by session time and by the number of pages viewed. Probably, this can be explained by the fact that friendly tape is consciously and unconsciously formed as a collection of “sources” that are relevant, understandable in language, arguments and images, and are similar in position and area of ​​interest of the user.
The traditional approach to interaction between the publication and the audience ends and begins a rather painful discussion and the need to choose whether to consider the only transition to the site or its mobile version to be the only successful model of user interaction in social networks - sites controlled by publishers. The paradigm shift, the turn from the concept of “we are in the house and we are waiting for everyone here” to the concept of “we are where our reader is” remains the most difficult, fundamental and at the same time most interesting challenge in the era of “new media”.
Exchange networks are, of course, an intra-Russian or, more precisely, an intra-RuNet phenomenon, which has almost no analogues. Today, many online media in RuNet have traffic from exchanges among the top three sources.
An amazing feature of this moneyless traffic exchange culture is that competitors exchange audiences and this has a good effect on increasing audience coverage and core growth if the rules are followed and the exchange is built without fraud, markups, and click simulators.
A common option is the infection of the exchange network by robot traffic, in which the shows and transitions are simulated, and the resource participant receives a “transition” not from the live, real user, but from the robot generated.
Another risk of abundant banner exchange is the clogging of the useful area of ​​the page with a large number of banner accounts. For the user, each page viewed by him looks like a platform with the highest competition of offers: links on the topic, other titles, transition points to the headings and the main page, announcements of special projects, commercial advertising and sometimes up to two dozen of their own and exchange teasers and banners. It is easy to understand that one display (update) of a page with all this garland can be completed with just one click, which means the probability of a click for each element presented on the page (headers, banners, headings, announcements, etc.) dramatically decreases. In addition, a large number of links to "external resources" inevitably leads to a drop in the depth of viewing the site.
Their influence on the structure of incoming traffic is especially noticeable in the regions. In many Russian republics, narrow-topic and local groups generate traffic to local news resources, surpassing referrals from news aggregators, social networks, or search.
Traffic from instant messengers has a good potential for quality, since, as a rule, it comes from thematic groups, where the probability of getting into the user's interest zone, as well as credibility of the recommendations, is quite high.
We should expect the desire of companies-owners to not let traffic out, leaving the audience - including news - inside the channels and “public”.
The share of none of the sources should not exceed 15–20%. In no case can one sit down on the “needle” of even the most respectable source, since this makes the position of the media unprotected.
History associated with the promotion of the Pskov regional site of a large family of AIF.ru. The "enterprising" editorial board decided that it was close enough to St. Petersburg to "capture" a huge Petersburg audience. Therefore, the news feed of the Pskov AIF section consisted mostly of Petersburg trend news. Notes often got into the news section of Yandex and brought huge traffic. As a result, the Pskov website has become a leader among other regional resources of one of the largest Russian media. But the audience mainly from news aggregators was 90% from St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region. It did not settle at the core of the Pskov site, did not provide for the influence of the resource in the region, and, moreover, did not interest advertisers - neither Pskov nor St. Petersburg.
The user got on one of the pages of the site (no matter what and where), and with it looked a few more pages. Most likely, the user found exactly the content that he expected to see, he was interested or useful, he saw obvious ways of switching to other materials on this topic or the announcement of other publications. He spent a lot of time on the site and looked at a sufficient number of pages.
This was facilitated by important and relevant to the interests of the user content, interesting and correct headers, good site loading speed, user-friendly layout and other factors.
This user not only “fulfilled” the efforts invested by the editors and promotion services, but with a high degree of probability will return to this resource.
The main thing is that the design and structure of the site offer the next transition point (material announcement, link to video or photo gallery, etc.) in the field of the most likely click, and the announcements and teasers themselves were formulated as correctly as possible, but at the same time clinging.
The layout of the text, the direction of long multimedia stories is very important, allowing the user to “pass” through the note as efficiently as possible, clinging to subtitles, video and audio cytats, cut-ins, photo galleries and panels with social network buttons.
High-tech editors and development teams, intra-editorial laboratories spend tremendous efforts to keep the audience within their resources, offering the user dozens of options to “stay”, trying to more accurately and efficiently “get” waiting for the user and win a click from the “cross in the right corner”.
One of the most promising and promising areas today is research in the field of semantic text analysis.
The main engine and customer of these surveys remains, of course, the advertising and services industry in the Internet and mobile environment.
The editorial offices of some media outlets began introducing another user engagement gauge - “prescroll count”, which allows calculating in one publication the proportion of users who reached the middle or the final paragraph of the publication. As a rule, this indicator does not exceed 50% on average, but it can be significantly higher if the direction of the note is thought out: there are many relevant paragraphs of illustrations, interactive elements and sidebars. The so-called “monotexts” have the smallest readability, that is, large pieces of a solid text.
Chartbeat.com, Parse.ly and internal publishing systems - why are they needed? To find out how a user reads your material: what delays attention, what scrolls through, at what point it leaves. Editorial metrics help improve the text and determine which content delivery methods work.
Key indicators: material scrolls; reading time.
Photo galleries can increase viewing depths without a synchronous increase in time, when a user views 10–20 photos for a minute, each of which has a unique URL.
High performance in the ratio of pages viewed on a unique user have sites with developed forums or active commenting on publications. These include, for example, the websites of “InoSMI” and “Echo of Moscow”, in the internal statistics of which the share of comment pages is high. The user repeatedly updates the page in anticipation of new comments, leaves his own, remaining in the "field" of one or several notes. Artificially, the “depth” indicator provides automatically updated pages of online broadcasts, although the popular and well-made text translation can provide organic, natural generation of views.
German scientists from Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität called the session the time between turning the screen of a smartphone on and off. The average session duration was 70 seconds (12 seconds - for sessions without unlocking, 104 - for sessions where the user saw the home screen). With a reading speed of about 200 words per minute, you can expect that the user of a smartphone during a typical session will have time to read no more than 300 words, which corresponds to a maximum of 1500-2000 characters depending on the language.
The audience of new media can be described as “flying”, badly recognizing brands, not inclined to work in one publication, investing less time for contacting one publication, poorly formulating its intentions.
Over half of the “desktop” time, users of the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East and Africa) share this:
In July 2015, according to comScore, Russia's digital population exceeded 80 million unique users. This assessment includes online PC and mobile users over 6 years old.
According to the TNS Web Index for the first quarter of 2015, 50 million people went to the Internet from a mobile device, and for 11.8 million Russians, the mobile Internet is the only point of access to the Network. By itself, the growth of the Runet’s audience slows down. It is expected that the runet will grow at the expense of the older groups of Russians.
Mobile users in cities of more than 700 thousand inhabitants in January 2015 used their devices to
In large cities (over 100 thousand inhabitants) there is a rapid growth of exclusive mobile Internet users. Over the year, the share of this audience has almost doubled - by 90%.
In 2015, there was a marked separation of content distribution channels. If earlier social networks and instant messengers were traffic-generating platforms for Internet publications, now we are seeing how these services become platforms for direct distribution of content. Media are beginning to adapt to new conditions and go with their content to where the user lives.
Internet publications will soon be divided into core- and meta-parts, that is, they will become multiplatform. Core is our sites and applications, meta is content for other sites, while it is important to understand - not teasers, but full presentation of the material.
In 2015, many publications in the United States began to produce their content in social networks and instant messengers. Not just to advertise your materials, but to fully tell stories where the reader is now living.
One of the most revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, trends today is the negative dynamics of both direct visits and internal transitions to the home page of sites.
For most users, it is more important to see a direct link to one or another note from specific “places and circumstances”: friend feed, news aggregator, banner on another site. Properly and effectively organized “delivery” of a specific publication to a user is much more important and more efficient than a “place of honor” even in the first window of the main page.
In the book Organized Mind: Thinking in the Age of Information Overload, neurobiologist Daniel Levitin calls attention one of the most important mental resources of the body, and the limited ability of the human brain to concentrate is the main problem of modern society, including journalism.
Behavioral psychologist Mihai Chikszentmieh and engineer Robert Lucky independently determined: that a person’s consciousness absorbs no more than 120 bits of information per second, and talking to one interlocutor requires 60 bits of attention per second.
Levitin writes: “In most cases you will not be able to understand what three people are talking about at the same time. On the planet, we are surrounded by billions of people, but at one moment can only understand two. ”
Levitin predicts the birth of a new profession: a specialist as a “filter of attention” for those who can pay for such services. Heads of companies, political leaders, movie stars keep close to them specialists who are engaged in limiting the flow of informational garbage, and important, on the contrary, are isolated and conveyed in a more complete form.
Those who are less successful will only rely on themselves and on professional journalists, who also act as “attention filters” for their audience. This is a big responsibility, but also a serious opportunity, a kind of salvation for modern journalism.
Huge digital data collections are available today as a source of news and analysis. With a large array of data, journalists can add analysis, context, explanation and a story about meaning to them. A typical example is Wikileaks. Journalists need to be more educated in data extraction and analysis of this data through collaboration with experts.
This chapter is best read in its entirety:
Business models of new and new media
The book was published last week in the publishing house of the Humanitarian University. The authors are media experts, university professors, journalists. Among foreign authors, for example, Michael Parks, Pulitzer Prize winner, former editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times, and Manuel Castells, the most famous theorist of the information society.
')
We quoted the most important thing to know and divided the quotes into 5 topics:
- Traffic
- User behavior on the site
- Who reads the media and how
- Changes and future
- Money
Traffic
Main sources of traffic
The main sources of traffic for digital media were social networks, search and marketing (exchange networks, buying traffic) - they all lead the user straight to the material page.
Two years ago, The New York Times, in its Innovation Report, stated the death of the classical information consumption scheme: “Traffic to the main page drops every year, month after month. The traffic to the main pages of the headings is insignificant. ” In this case, the total traffic on the site The New York Times does not fall. Simply, people began to enter through the “other door” - through search and social networks.
About traffic from search
The performance of the audience that reaches the news sites from search engines is not very high. Sessions are usually short, and their depth is small. Focus groups demonstrate that both the first and repeated contacts of the user with the resource are characterized by "teflon", a low degree of brand recognition.
The search query involves interaction - the answer. The closer to the request will be the answer, the more likely that it will satisfy the user. In this case, the request (and the answer to it) is not necessarily relevant.
You can write the so-called evergreen (evergreen) material, which will attract a large number of users for quite a long time.
Syntactically, the title of such material matches or is close to the search query. Often it begins with the words “how”, “why”, “what” and briefly answers the question asked. Some publications, such as the foreign Lifehacker.com and the Russian, have built a key part of their business, generating just such materials. They can, for example, explain how to watch the Super Bowl for free without a cable network or give the user an idea of ​​a gift for February 14 (Valentine's Day).
About traffic from aggregators
Many Russian publications receive over 20% of the audience from news aggregators. This is such an important source that sometimes a small department appears in the newsroom, generating news for aggregation sites. Usually we are talking about frequently changing short news, in the headlines of which actual newsmakers are mentioned, and the text is compiled from several sources included in the news cluster.
Transitions from Yandex.News, Google News, Rambler, Mail.Ru News in Russia, as a rule, occupy a place in the top three or five sources.
The effectiveness of the behavior of users who have switched to news sites from news aggregators is extremely low: the viewing depth is 1-1.7 pages, the session time is less than a minute. Indirectly, one can also speak of a low degree of conversion into the core for users who are in contact with a news resource in this way.
About traffic from social networks
Unlike traffic from news aggregators, transitions from social networks are fruitful, and the audience shows high efficiency of work on the site or in its mobile version - both by session time and by the number of pages viewed. Probably, this can be explained by the fact that friendly tape is consciously and unconsciously formed as a collection of “sources” that are relevant, understandable in language, arguments and images, and are similar in position and area of ​​interest of the user.
About the problem with social networks
The traditional approach to interaction between the publication and the audience ends and begins a rather painful discussion and the need to choose whether to consider the only transition to the site or its mobile version to be the only successful model of user interaction in social networks - sites controlled by publishers. The paradigm shift, the turn from the concept of “we are in the house and we are waiting for everyone here” to the concept of “we are where our reader is” remains the most difficult, fundamental and at the same time most interesting challenge in the era of “new media”.
Exchange networks: problems
Exchange networks are, of course, an intra-Russian or, more precisely, an intra-RuNet phenomenon, which has almost no analogues. Today, many online media in RuNet have traffic from exchanges among the top three sources.
An amazing feature of this moneyless traffic exchange culture is that competitors exchange audiences and this has a good effect on increasing audience coverage and core growth if the rules are followed and the exchange is built without fraud, markups, and click simulators.
A common option is the infection of the exchange network by robot traffic, in which the shows and transitions are simulated, and the resource participant receives a “transition” not from the live, real user, but from the robot generated.
It is not even recognized by many market participants and is not perceived as a fraud.
Another risk of abundant banner exchange is the clogging of the useful area of ​​the page with a large number of banner accounts. For the user, each page viewed by him looks like a platform with the highest competition of offers: links on the topic, other titles, transition points to the headings and the main page, announcements of special projects, commercial advertising and sometimes up to two dozen of their own and exchange teasers and banners. It is easy to understand that one display (update) of a page with all this garland can be completed with just one click, which means the probability of a click for each element presented on the page (headers, banners, headings, announcements, etc.) dramatically decreases. In addition, a large number of links to "external resources" inevitably leads to a drop in the depth of viewing the site.
Messengers, regions, trust
Their influence on the structure of incoming traffic is especially noticeable in the regions. In many Russian republics, narrow-topic and local groups generate traffic to local news resources, surpassing referrals from news aggregators, social networks, or search.
Traffic from instant messengers has a good potential for quality, since, as a rule, it comes from thematic groups, where the probability of getting into the user's interest zone, as well as credibility of the recommendations, is quite high.
We should expect the desire of companies-owners to not let traffic out, leaving the audience - including news - inside the channels and “public”.
What should be the proportion of traffic
The share of none of the sources should not exceed 15–20%. In no case can one sit down on the “needle” of even the most respectable source, since this makes the position of the media unprotected.
How not to drive traffic
History associated with the promotion of the Pskov regional site of a large family of AIF.ru. The "enterprising" editorial board decided that it was close enough to St. Petersburg to "capture" a huge Petersburg audience. Therefore, the news feed of the Pskov AIF section consisted mostly of Petersburg trend news. Notes often got into the news section of Yandex and brought huge traffic. As a result, the Pskov website has become a leader among other regional resources of one of the largest Russian media. But the audience mainly from news aggregators was 90% from St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region. It did not settle at the core of the Pskov site, did not provide for the influence of the resource in the region, and, moreover, did not interest advertisers - neither Pskov nor St. Petersburg.
User behavior on the site
What to strive for?
The user got on one of the pages of the site (no matter what and where), and with it looked a few more pages. Most likely, the user found exactly the content that he expected to see, he was interested or useful, he saw obvious ways of switching to other materials on this topic or the announcement of other publications. He spent a lot of time on the site and looked at a sufficient number of pages.
This was facilitated by important and relevant to the interests of the user content, interesting and correct headers, good site loading speed, user-friendly layout and other factors.
This user not only “fulfilled” the efforts invested by the editors and promotion services, but with a high degree of probability will return to this resource.
How to achieve engagement
The main thing is that the design and structure of the site offer the next transition point (material announcement, link to video or photo gallery, etc.) in the field of the most likely click, and the announcements and teasers themselves were formulated as correctly as possible, but at the same time clinging.
The layout of the text, the direction of long multimedia stories is very important, allowing the user to “pass” through the note as efficiently as possible, clinging to subtitles, video and audio cytats, cut-ins, photo galleries and panels with social network buttons.
What can data analysis and technology involve
High-tech editors and development teams, intra-editorial laboratories spend tremendous efforts to keep the audience within their resources, offering the user dozens of options to “stay”, trying to more accurately and efficiently “get” waiting for the user and win a click from the “cross in the right corner”.
One of the most promising and promising areas today is research in the field of semantic text analysis.
This is important, among other things, for a more accurate selection of “links by topic” and movement in the direction of “individual packages” of a header for a user whose behavior has already been studied and informational expectations are predicted.
The main engine and customer of these surveys remains, of course, the advertising and services industry in the Internet and mobile environment.
About editorial metrics
The editorial offices of some media outlets began introducing another user engagement gauge - “prescroll count”, which allows calculating in one publication the proportion of users who reached the middle or the final paragraph of the publication. As a rule, this indicator does not exceed 50% on average, but it can be significantly higher if the direction of the note is thought out: there are many relevant paragraphs of illustrations, interactive elements and sidebars. The so-called “monotexts” have the smallest readability, that is, large pieces of a solid text.
Chartbeat.com, Parse.ly and internal publishing systems - why are they needed? To find out how a user reads your material: what delays attention, what scrolls through, at what point it leaves. Editorial metrics help improve the text and determine which content delivery methods work.
Key indicators: material scrolls; reading time.
About the depth of viewing and how it is artificially increased
Photo galleries can increase viewing depths without a synchronous increase in time, when a user views 10–20 photos for a minute, each of which has a unique URL.
High performance in the ratio of pages viewed on a unique user have sites with developed forums or active commenting on publications. These include, for example, the websites of “InoSMI” and “Echo of Moscow”, in the internal statistics of which the share of comment pages is high. The user repeatedly updates the page in anticipation of new comments, leaves his own, remaining in the "field" of one or several notes. Artificially, the “depth” indicator provides automatically updated pages of online broadcasts, although the popular and well-made text translation can provide organic, natural generation of views.
Who reads the media and how
How many users have time to read
German scientists from Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität called the session the time between turning the screen of a smartphone on and off. The average session duration was 70 seconds (12 seconds - for sessions without unlocking, 104 - for sessions where the user saw the home screen). With a reading speed of about 200 words per minute, you can expect that the user of a smartphone during a typical session will have time to read no more than 300 words, which corresponds to a maximum of 1500-2000 characters depending on the language.
As user reads
The audience of new media can be described as “flying”, badly recognizing brands, not inclined to work in one publication, investing less time for contacting one publication, poorly formulating its intentions.
What the user looks on the Internet
Over half of the “desktop” time, users of the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East and Africa) share this:
- 22% goes to social networks;
- 11% are entertainment;
- 10% owned by portals;
- 5% paid to online shopping;
- 4% accounts for the consumption of news and information resources.
Russia in 2015
In July 2015, according to comScore, Russia's digital population exceeded 80 million unique users. This assessment includes online PC and mobile users over 6 years old.
Only 30% of users use the Internet on mobile devices or several platforms.
According to the TNS Web Index for the first quarter of 2015, 50 million people went to the Internet from a mobile device, and for 11.8 million Russians, the mobile Internet is the only point of access to the Network. By itself, the growth of the Runet’s audience slows down. It is expected that the runet will grow at the expense of the older groups of Russians.
Mobile users in cities of more than 700 thousand inhabitants in January 2015 used their devices to
- search (Google, Yandex);
- communications (social networks VK and Facebook, messengers Whatsapp and Viber);
- consuming visual content (YouTube, Instagram);
- portal tasks, including news (Google, Yandex, Mail.ru);
- receiving reference information (Wikipedia)
In large cities (over 100 thousand inhabitants) there is a rapid growth of exclusive mobile Internet users. Over the year, the share of this audience has almost doubled - by 90%.
Changes and future
Media are divided into 2 parts: sites and social networks
In 2015, there was a marked separation of content distribution channels. If earlier social networks and instant messengers were traffic-generating platforms for Internet publications, now we are seeing how these services become platforms for direct distribution of content. Media are beginning to adapt to new conditions and go with their content to where the user lives.
Internet publications will soon be divided into core- and meta-parts, that is, they will become multiplatform. Core is our sites and applications, meta is content for other sites, while it is important to understand - not teasers, but full presentation of the material.
In 2015, many publications in the United States began to produce their content in social networks and instant messengers. Not just to advertise your materials, but to fully tell stories where the reader is now living.
About the login page
One of the most revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, trends today is the negative dynamics of both direct visits and internal transitions to the home page of sites.
For most users, it is more important to see a direct link to one or another note from specific “places and circumstances”: friend feed, news aggregator, banner on another site. Properly and effectively organized “delivery” of a specific publication to a user is much more important and more efficient than a “place of honor” even in the first window of the main page.
A person’s consciousness absorbs no more than 120 bits of information per second: the media as a “attention filter”
In the book Organized Mind: Thinking in the Age of Information Overload, neurobiologist Daniel Levitin calls attention one of the most important mental resources of the body, and the limited ability of the human brain to concentrate is the main problem of modern society, including journalism.
Behavioral psychologist Mihai Chikszentmieh and engineer Robert Lucky independently determined: that a person’s consciousness absorbs no more than 120 bits of information per second, and talking to one interlocutor requires 60 bits of attention per second.
So, a person who pays full attention to two interlocutors is at the limit of his abilities.
Levitin writes: “In most cases you will not be able to understand what three people are talking about at the same time. On the planet, we are surrounded by billions of people, but at one moment can only understand two. ”
Levitin predicts the birth of a new profession: a specialist as a “filter of attention” for those who can pay for such services. Heads of companies, political leaders, movie stars keep close to them specialists who are engaged in limiting the flow of informational garbage, and important, on the contrary, are isolated and conveyed in a more complete form.
Those who are less successful will only rely on themselves and on professional journalists, who also act as “attention filters” for their audience. This is a big responsibility, but also a serious opportunity, a kind of salvation for modern journalism.
Data Extraction, Data Analysis, Data Visualization and Mapping
Huge digital data collections are available today as a source of news and analysis. With a large array of data, journalists can add analysis, context, explanation and a story about meaning to them. A typical example is Wikileaks. Journalists need to be more educated in data extraction and analysis of this data through collaboration with experts.
Money
This chapter is best read in its entirety:
Business models of new and new media
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/303252/
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