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Currents: Taking the guesswork out of digital content
Allow me to philosophize for a moment. Our attention is constantly divided. With so many things competing for our time online, the content we choose to read or watch reveals what we care about. It’s why Netflix thinks of Fortnite as a bigger competitor than HBO. Attention data matters because attention is a limited resource.…
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How to be funny: A comic’s advice to content teams
If you’ve ever watched Disney’s The Little Mermaid, you might remember the profound wisdom that Sebastian the Crab shares at the beginning of the song, Under the Sea, saying “Ariel, the human world — it’s a mess.” How accurate. You see, the world is a mess. A big scary mess, filled with big scary things,…
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Members only: Membership strategies from media companies
Whether you’re a small niche YouTube channel or a decades-old media brand, you’ve likely explored membership as a way to generate revenue. But building and maintaining an effective (and profitable) membership program isn’t an easy feat. Four professionals who have built very different communities and membership programs for their respective businesses spoke on a panel…
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Appointment viewing: What happens online when we all watch the same show?
We’ve been measuring attention on the internet for coming up on ten years now. One thing that remains constant: our collective amount of attention doesn’t change much day to day. We can actually see in our data systems and processing plants a representation of the “amount” of attention, measured by the number of stories people…
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Tips from WIRED’s evergreen content strategy
Is your content archive working harder than you’re giving it credit for? WIRED’s Director of Audience Development Indu Chandrasekhar recently shared that 40% of WIRED’s visits goes to content that’s at least a week old. “We are dedicated to trying to figure out how to make WIRED’s 26-year-old archive—as well as everything new that we…
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Four awesome Instagram strategies for sharing content
Social media teams who focus on content and content distribution have found themselves a little stymied by Instagram, at least if our data is any indication. As of May 2019, Instagram ranks as only the 15th highest source of referral traffic to content and media sites, even though the platform has 1 billion monthly users.…
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Alerts in email, Slack, or wherever you’re at
When we visit our clients’ offices, Parse.ly is usually up on big-screen TVs and second monitors. “We’ve seen a story spike to multiple hundreds of people reading it. If you happen to be looking at Parse.ly when it happens, it’s really cool. People get excited,” said Leah Becerra, Regional Growth Producer at The Kansas City…
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Link-in-bio providers add 10-15% to Instagram referral traffic
Instagram has 500 million daily active users and a billion monthly users, making it the third most popular social media platform. Yet, it sends just a tiny fraction of the amount of traffic back to sites that Facebook does. Twitter, with one-third of the active monthly users Instagram has, still sends five times the traffic…
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Reader loyalty data shows more sessions per visitor from social, more views per session from search
Building a habit takes time. In the way that these stats live in our collective, though often inaccurate, hive mind, there’s some stat that says it takes 21 days to build a habit. Jeremy Dean, the author of Making Habits, Breaking Habits, shows that depending on the “difficulty” of the habit, it can take much…
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Power your distribution strategy with campaign tracking
“If you build it, they will come” only works for Kevin Costner. For marketers with digital audiences, just as much effort has to go into distributing content as creating it — sometimes more! Efforts of social media managers, marketers, and audience development experts make sure discovery isn’t left to chance. Using UTM parameters and measuring…