The Weekly Bulletin | October 22, 2024

Catch up on your members' content, check out the community buzz, and browse through job opportunities

Author

Vahe Arabian
October 22, 2024

Hi SODP community,

Let’s recap on what’s been happening, the new content, industry updates, tips, and more.

TIP OF THE WEEK

In today’s Tip of the Week, I’d like to revisit a case study of how Stears executed a subscriber-focused content and live blogging strategy during an election year.

Providing value-led content for existing subscribers whilst attracting new ones requires a lead-in strategy strategy. Stears provides economic and industry data and insight to facilitate decision-making for global organizations investing and operating in Africa.

Many larger publishers received the 'Trump bump' in the past due to key election coverage. Let's dive into Stears' success story (how we helped) and how you can do this during the 2024 election year.

Key Strategy Highlights

  • Addressing Paywall SEO Visibility Challenges & Retaining Audiences: Including the necessary markup, i.e., accessiblefreee and advising on front blocking - CSS approach to avoiding scraping content helped increase their explainer content and maintain users.

  • Turning Events Into Engagement Opportunities: Stears leveraged their unique insights and commentary to drive traffic and conversions by launching a live blogging platform during Nigeria's elections.

  • Unlocking SEO Potential: Stears' approach to programmatic SEO sets a blueprint for success in driving lead-in traffic and ongoing baseline traffic. They created an election center outlining all of the candidates in all region's polling numbers and biographies, which essentially aids users in learning about the candidates they could

Results

  • Measurable Impact: From a 2-fold increase in traffic (3 million users) in a 6-week period in the 2023 election in comparison to the 2019 election.

  • Credibility Boost: Earning links from reputable sites, i.e., NYTimes and The Guardian, solidified Stears' position as a trusted source of information.

Your Action Plan

Reflect on your current election coverage strategy and identify areas where you can apply Stears' insights.

  • Can you put together an explainer series that can retain users?

  • Can you set up a live blog to engage and convert live audiences?

  • Can you use repositories of information and create a service that not only brings awareness to important issues but makes it an essential service for your community and audience?

Additional Resources

A few months ago, we hosted a webinar with Quintype on how newsrooms can capitalize on election season to drive growth. Whether you’re covering the upcoming presidential elections in the United States, or preparing for your local elections next year and would like to get a jump on things, this webinar – now available on-demand – has a ton of useful tips and insights.

SODP POSTS

Digital advertising is undergoing significant changes. Contributing factors include evolving privacy regulations and the removal of third-party cookies from browsers. The pace of change has created a divide between those adopting new strategies and those relying on outdated methods, with this gap most pronounced among web publishers.

With third-party cookies nearly extinct, first-party data has taken center stage. ‘Identity’ solutions, focused on matching publisher-collected user emails and phone numbers, have emerged as the preferred method to replace the targeting quality advertisers and agencies are eager to maintain. Identity solutions refer broadly to a form of personalized data that complies with established privacy regulations and standards. This means protecting personally identifiable data by securely ‘hashing’ and serializing it, allowing advertisers and publishers to keep user data anonymous while matching users with campaigns via a unique identifier (ad ID).

Traditional financial systems have always been a commandment of the publishing industry, with authors earning relatively few royalties, especially in the self-publishing sphere. Payment delays, high transaction fees, and several intermediaries are an imperfect environment for the creators. This is where cryptocurrency, and more specifically Ethereum, has the potential to transform outdated royalty structures that have dominated the publishing world for years.

The digital currency, Ethereum, is a way for authors to accept payments directly from readers without handling so many of the usual middlemen who siphon off a piece of an author’s earnings. Can crypto payments really be used to redefine author royalties? As we tackle the increasingly merged boundaries of cryptocurrency and publishing, it’s clear that Ethereum, and probably blockchain technology, can bring about a new age in how authors are paid for their work, just like it is working its magic on trading platforms like Binance for investors.

Transparency and trust: How news consumers in Canada want AI to be used in journalism

When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI) and news production, Canadian news consumers want to know when, how and why AI is part of journalistic work. And if they don’t get that transparency, they could lose trust in news organizations.

News consumers are so concerned about how the use of AI could impact the accuracy of stories and the spread of misinformation, a majority favour government regulation of how AI is used in journalism.

JOB BOARD

➡️ The Times and Sunday Times are looking for an experienced podcast executive to lead the strategy, development and production of trhei podcast portfolio (London, UK). SEE MORE

➡️ Quire is searching for a knowledgeable digital news audience development & engagement specialist to join its team on a consultative basis for a 7 to 10-week project (Remote, US). SEE MORE

COMMUNITY BUZZ

Industry News

➡️ SearchGPT, despite being in limited beta, is growing more quickly than other established generative engines like Perplexity and Claude — and generating more referral traffic for brands. READ MORE

➡️ A year in, The Guardian’s European edition contributes 15% of the publisher’s pageviews. READ MORE

Announcement for Australian Publishers

🚨 The Australian Government is providing critical support through the Public Interest News Gathering (PING) grants, which aim to ensure local news providers can continue delivering essential news and information to their communities. If you're a publisher, now is the time to apply! Applications close on 10th November 2024. READ MORE

Social Media Discussions

➡️ Wes Bos on LinkedIn:

How is this website so fast?

A tweet about this site went viral last night, so I take a look behind McMaster-Carr and detail all the techniques they are using to make it fast.

They are doing it all — prefetching HTML, inlined CSS, fixed images, pushstate — and all on a stack with 15 year old tech.

These are the highlights for the last week.

Until next!

Vahe Arabian and the editorial team at SODP