As plenty of publishing industry veterans know, readers are increasingly going online for their news — and that’s causing declining subscription numbers for many publications globally. But what’s not so obvious is the ways in which people arrive at content online.
A March 2014 report from the Pew Research Journalism Project shined a spotlight on the different ways that consumers find content and how those habits affect their engagement with and loyalty to the news sites they visit. To reach their conclusions about online engagement, Pew Research analyzed three months of comScore data for 26 of the most popular news websites.
Trends in visitor engagement
The key takeaway from Pew’s research is that users who go directly to a particular news website tend to be more engaged with that site than visitors who happen upon sites in other, more indirect ways. Pew found that when visitors arrive directly on a site, either by accessing it via a bookmark or by typing a URL into a browser, they spend an average of 4 minutes and 36 seconds there. They view almost 25 unique pages per month and make about 11 return visits to the site.
When visitors find a piece of content on a news site from another route, such as following a link, those engagement indicators decrease dramatically. For example, Pew Research found that people who arrive at a news website via a Facebook link spend about 63 percent less time, see 83 percent fewer pages per month and make about 73 percent fewer visits than those visitors who arrive directly. Organic traffic brought only slightly more engaged visitors; visitors from search averaged 63 percent less time on the site, 80 percent fewer unique page views and almost 72 percent fewer visits than direct visitors.
It’s also notable that Pew found surprisingly little overlap among these three distinct groups — whether direct, social or organic, visitors tended to continue visiting the site via that channel. Pew therefore concluded that “converting social media or search eyeballs to dedicated readers is difficult to do.”
The dilemma: traffic versus loyalty
For content publishers, this presents an interesting conundrum: Either focus on clicks by producing eye-grabbing headlines, or aim for brand loyalty by producing quality content. In a world of constrained resources, both budgetary and otherwise, it is difficult to do both things successfully, and publications are often forced to choose one or the other.
One company that has chosen not to take sides, but to simply “be part of the conversation online,” isBuzzfeed.com, said its Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith in a Wired.co.uk interview cited in the Pew research. Pew found that the link-baiting site receives 50 percent of its laptop and desktop traffic from Facebook users, far more than the 32 percent who visit the site directly. But this strategy works for Buzzfeed, Smith said, because the site is less concerned with loyalty and more with reaching as many people as possible – and in doing so, driving advertising revenue.
On the other hand, publishers could also take after The New York Times and nytimes.com, which epitomize the other end of that spectrum. The Times seeks to win over its readers and earn their long-term loyalty through quality content and brand recognition, which is reflected in the 37 percent of the site’s traffic that is generated via direct visits, versus only 7 percent trickling in from Facebook.