Does More Content Necessarily Mean More Traffic?
The debate over more content did not start with the internet. For decades, there has been pressure to create more content in a bid to increase revenue. With ad markets turning once again, digital publishers are forced to ask themselves the question, “if I publish more, will I make more money?”
Before the internet crushed the magazine business, there was a trend to deliver bigger magazines. As Benedict Evans writes in his deep report on the 75 years of US advertising:
In other words, if your users are flat, increasing the ad load can lead to higher revenue (this will sound familiar to many social network users). Of course, more ad pages needed more content pages to pad them out (the ratio was typically 65:35), and that meant more people to fill them.
If you have a ratio of 65:35 of ad pages to content pages, the only way to grow the 65 is to also grow the 35. And so magazines got bigger. They got so much bigger that in 2011, Business Insider wrote a story about how shocked they were that the January issue of Time was so thin.
But this notion of creating more content to support more ads has always been something debated in the media space. And so, the only thing shocking about this WSJ story about BuzzFeed wanting its writers to write more content is that WSJ hit publish.
BuzzFeed News Editor in Chief Karolina Waclawiak told staff at a recent meeting that increasing the news division’s volume and traffic was part of an effort to help the newsroom meet a goal of becoming profitable this year.
“There are so many things outside of our control—the advertising market, the economy, a recession,” Ms. Waclawiak told the newsroom, according to a transcript of the meeting reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “But what we can control is how many stories we publish each day.”
Ms. Waclawiak during the staff meeting also noted that the effort to increase volume came while the newsroom was “much smaller than it used to be.”
There is nuance to this debate that warrants discussion. It’s a topic I find myself pondering in my day job. But there is a way to tackle it without it becoming such a burdensome discussion.
Yes, publishing more content will drive more traffic. In the short-term, tackling more topics will absolutely drive more traffic. With every story published, there is another opportunity for a reader to find a piece of content that they find interesting.
And so, the first level thinking of publishing more content is correct. And my suspicion is that the executive who told Waclawiak to publish more content stopped thinking at this first level.
The question comes over the long-term. And here is where I believe the “more is better” argument can breakdown. If you are thinking about a business beyond the next few months or even year, blindly publishing more content will wind up hurting the publication.
And here’s why… As luxurious a job it is to be a writer (we literally get paid to put thoughts on paper), it is still work. When I write a particularly tough piece, I let out a big sigh when it is finally done. Talking to sources, contextualizing that information, and writing is work. And so, by pushing people to do more of it, one of two things is going to happen.
First, the writers are going to burn out. The perfectionists in the room are going to work more hours, spend more time writing, and the outcome will be burn out. I know what that’s like. I’ve now twice stopped recording my podcast because of this same burnout.
Second, the writers are going to reduce the effort per piece to hit their quotas. If you had a day to write one piece, that’s eight hours to do your job. If you’re asked to write two pieces, now you have four hours per piece. While I subscribe to the belief that people fill their time with the amount of work you give them, there are limits to that. What if it’s three stories a day? Now it’s fewer than three hours per piece. Four stories is two hours. At some point, there is not enough time to tell a good story.
While burnout is certainly problematic, it’s the second point that gives me the greatest cause for concern for the long-term health of the publication. If readers are expecting a certain quality and that starts to drop because of a push for more quantity, those same readers will begin to walk away. It won’t happen immediately. I still open some once respectable websites that have fallen into the trap of quantity over quality. But over time, my perception of the brand evolves. I walk in expecting to feel a bit of disappointment.
Brand perception is massive. I spent years resisting getting a Business Insider subscription because I still thought of it as a slideshow factory. Even though they have some incredible marketing and advertising-related coverage, I couldn’t get over the brand perception that had been built a decade ago. Once you burn a reader, it takes a long time to earn their trust again. (Disclosure: Business Insider is owned by Axel Springer and so is Morning Brew, where I work.)
And so, while BuzzFeed will certainly see a rise in traffic in the short-term, over the long-term, it will hurt its advertising because fewer people will stick around for it to really matter.
So, what can publishers do?
The first question we have to ask is, “what do our readers need?” It must start with the reader. Too often, we make decisions with a focus on the business.
- We need more traffic
- We need more ad revenue
- We need more subscriptions
All might be true, but they forget one clear thing: traffic, ad revenue, and subscriptions are all a function of the reader. And so, we have to stop and ask what our readers need.
Then we need to devise an editorial strategy that gives us that. It’s certainly possible that your current editorial output is not enough. Morning Brew has historically been a newsletter-first company, which as a format is very limiting. If we weren’t newsletter-first, would that change our editorial output capability?
Second, we have to ask whether our systems allow for an increase in quality output. What tasks outside of reporting and writing are you having your writers do? For example, are they spending four hours per day reporting and writing and the other four hours doing social media for the publication?
The reporters write. The editors edit. The fact checkers verify. The copy editors do final copy clean up. Each person in a newsroom does their job. Content creation is an assembly line. Henry Ford proved that more could get done if people focused on one thing and became exceptional at it.
And third, with these process changes, we have to ask if we are accomplishing our goals while upholding the expected quality of content. But we have to be careful here. The numbers might show that traffic is up, but as I said above, traffic doesn’t directly correlate to a rise in brand perception. Therefore, we need to qualitatively assess the content, not just quantitatively. If we find that we are not giving the readers what they need because of a drop in quality, we need to rework the output. This is where it becomes a resource conversation as much as a process one.
The problem with an advertising model is that there are only three ways to make more money:
- Increase the price of the ad
- Increase the number of ads on a page
- Increase the amount of people seeing the ads
Market forces limit the first one. Poor user experience limits the second one. And so, executives feel that the only way is to focus on the third one. Get more people seeing the ads. How do you get more people? Create more content.
But I would argue that if you are focusing on giving the readers what they need, you will actually be able to manipulate #1. If I can guarantee to my advertisers that all the most powerful CMOs are reading Marketing Brew first and foremost, they’ll pay a lot of money. How do I guarantee I have those readers? Give them what they need.
More content does equal more traffic. But that’s only in the short-term. If you’re looking to build a long-term, sustainable business, the creation of more content needs to be directly linked to giving the reader what they need.
Thanks for reading today’s piece. If you have thoughts, hit reply or join the AMO Slack. I hope you have a great weekend!
