The Weekly Bulletin | May 31, 2023

Hi SODP community,

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

SODP POSTS

WHAT IS EVERGREEN CONTENT?

Every digital publisher should be looking to create at least some content that drives website traffic for years with minimal upkeep.

Content creators know the challenges of creating content that attracts clicks, which makes evergreen content that continues to rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs) long after it’s published ever more valuable.

Ahrefs found that of the more than 2 million new web pages it studied, only 5.7% ranked in Google’s top 10 within a year. In other words, focusing on evergreen content is a crucial long-term content strategy for driving traffic, building an audience for less money and establishing topical authority.

Now, it’s all very well to say create high-value and optimized evergreen content, but the process can be challenging. Join us as we look at seven tips that can help any publisher create their own evergreen content and then leverage it to build a sustainable revenue stream while trimming time and resource commitments.

SEE MORE

AOP: PUBLISHERS, ADVERTISERS MUST COOPERATE OVER DATA SCRAPING THREAT

The death of the third-party cookie is supposed to benefit publishers, better positioning them to extract greater advertising value from their first-party data.

However, between preparing for the “cookieless future”, fighting Facebook and Google for compensation over news snippet sharing and trying to identify the emergent risks posed by AI, some publishers may not be aware of another potential issue on the horizon.

The UK-based Association of Online Publishers (AOP) printed an open letter in March warning the publishing and advertising industries of the dangers of content verification vendors’ unauthorized data scraping.

The letter, which was signed by AOP Managing Director Richard Reeves, argues these vendors — either through packing hidden tags into authorized in-header wrappers or using crawlers — are building “contextual audience segments for their own commercial gain”.

To better understand the AOP’s concerns and the potential dangers to publishers, we reached out to Reeves with some questions.

SEE MORE

JOB BOARD

➡️ Stacker is currently recruiting across its Culture, News, and Money desks. SEE MORE

➡️ Dotdash Meredith is looking for a Senior Editor who will be responsible for assigning and editing content of all lengths and formats, from short news items to long-form features. SEE MORE

NEWSLETTERS WE RECOMMEND

➡️ Write On is the newsletter that makes you a better copywriter. SEE MORE

➡️ The Website Flip you get websites for sale in your inbox. Save hours searching through broker listings. Get 10+ websites & aged domains for sale weekly. SEE MORE

MEMBER PROFILE OF THE WEEK

Each week, we’ll introduce one of the community members – either one of the newest additions or those who’ve been actively contributing to discussions. Feel free to give them a shoutout on our Slack channel or connect on LinkedIn.

This week, our member of the week is Ali Mahmood, Deputy Chief of Party, Central Europe Media Program.

Thank you, Ali, for constantly curating and sharing SEO tips and resources!

COMMUNITY BUZZ

INDUSTRY NEWS

➡️ Google officially released 7 FREE courses related to Generative AI. READ MORE

➡️ Data from Facebook's latest ‘Widely Viewed Content Report’ shows 92.3% of the views in the US during Q1 2023 did not include a link to a source outside of Facebook. READ MORE

SOCIAL MEDIA DISCUSSIONS

➡️ Swapnil Pate on LinkedIn

One of our clients has 3x'ed their traffic in a span of 6 months after our recommendation to prune 50% of their content!

I am a strong believer in Less = More strategy

The results?

➡️ Organic traffic tripled in 6 months
➡️ Subscriptions grew by 45%
➡️ Got 48 highly authoritative backlinks from publications all around the world

SEE THE POST

These are the highlights for last week.

Until next!

Andrew Kemp and the editorial team at SODP