Business Insider sets an arbitrary word limit on articles
You should focus on more than "average reading time" when assessing article metrics.
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Let’s jump right into it…
Business Insider sets an arbitrary word limit on articles
Media reporter Kerry Flynn published a memo from Insider EiC Nicholas Carlson mandating that all future articles should be under 600 words long.
The first thing to note is that there are significant carve outs to this rule. “This rule applies to everyone except our investigations team, features writers, commentary/explainers team, and Service Journalism team,” wrote Carlson. “It also does not apply to slideshows, listicles, and approved features.” This led Jonathan Chait to quip, “Maybe they should just name the one person whose stories are too long?”
All kidding aside, I reflexively recoil from stuff like this, and on the whole I think setting arbitrary word count limits is bad. Every few months, a media executive has the lightbulb epiphany that internet users don’t like to read long stuff, and this insight almost always lacks nuance and is based on misguided metrics.
Let’s take Carlson’s reasoning for the 600-word limit as an example:
Why are we doing this? For our readers. Data shows they like short stories and don’t want to spend time on longer ones. Readers can read about 250 words a minute. The current average engagement time for a story on our site is 51 seconds. So people are reading about 212 words and moving on
Anyone who’s spent any amount of time in a web analytics dashboard can spot the flaw in this reasoning right away.
First, a significant number of website visitors bounce off the site almost immediately. People might land on your article, bookmark it, and close the tab. Or they simply clicked on the link by mistake. Or it’s not a human at all; it’s just a bot that your analytics mistook for a human. Any visit that’s less than five seconds is going to drag down an article’s average visit time and yet tells you nothing meaningful about what a user found engaging.
Also, the fact that the average is 51 seconds means that a significant portion of an article’s readership stayed for well above 51 seconds. These are arguably the publication’s most valuable readers; not only will more ads load as they scroll, but their deeper engagement means they’re more likely to convert into paying subscribers than someone who scanned a headline and a few opening paragraphs.
Let’s say an article receives 100,000 visits, and that 50,000 are almost instantaneous bounces with a visit time of less than five seconds. And then let’s say another 25,000 stayed for a full 30 seconds, enough to read the headline and intro. And then let’s say the remaining 25,000 stayed for at least 180 seconds, getting well into the meat of the article. Under those metrics, the average visit time would be 55 seconds, but at least half the people who actually read the article stayed for three times that length!
Lastly, I just don’t think an article’s merits should be judged solely on whether people reach the end of it. That’s one of the beauties of journalism, that you can extract the exact amount of information you want from it and move on. Those highly engaged with the subject matter can read to the end, but those who desire only a surface level knowledge can consume half of the article and close the tab. Putting all your emphasis on the latter reader while excluding the informational needs of the former can result in less deep engagement with your product. Given Insider’s reliance on paid subscriptions, I would argue that deep engagement is something it should keep pursuing.
Why I’m bullish on Spotify’s live audio tool
Spotify launched its new live audio tool Greenroom, which many are comparing to Clubhouse. TechCrunch reports:
Speakers in the room appear at the top of the screen as rounded profile icons, while listeners appear below as smaller icons. There are mute options, moderation controls and the ability to bring listeners onstage during the live audio session. Rooms can host up to 1,000 people, and Spotify expects to scale up that number later on.
Listeners can also virtually applaud speakers by giving them “gems” in the app — a feature that came over from Locker Room, too. The number of gems a speaker earned displays next to their profile image during a session. For now, there’s no monetary value associated with the gems, but that seems an obvious next step as Greenroom today offers no form of monetization.
I think the biggest draw here is that Spotify made it easy for users to quickly receive an mp3 file of the live conversation so it can be uploaded as a podcast. That makes it 10X more useful than Clubhouse.
To understand the potential here, consider how gamers currently approach both live streaming and on demand video. They’ll usually spend several hours gaming on Twitch and monetize their highly-engaged live audience through donations. Then they’ll take the recording of that session, edit together the most interesting bits, and then slap that video up on YouTube, where it can be monetized into perpetuity through advertising.
Spotify can foster a similar dynamic where creators host a live show that features audience participation (including donations and subscriptions) and then broadcast the recorded version to a much larger audience that can be monetized through dynamically inserted ads.
I think 12 months from now Clubhouse’s founders will be kicking themselves for not building the same functionality into their app from the very beginning.
The New York Post has become a content mill
Insider reports on the terrible morale within The New York Post now that it’s been transformed into a content mill:
Some Post employees are already complaining that they are being asked to do more aggregation — rewriting another outlet's story without adding significant additional reporting, a common practice across the internet at high-volume sites, including Insider. The practice provides a reliable business model for ad-driven publications like the Post, which are fighting to maintain the boom-time traffic levels inspired by the Trump years.
To be sure, the Post has long been a high-speed website, with "lights and sirens" as Post shorthand for publishing quickly. But writers at the Post say they are being pushed to do more and more. One reporter said they have been asked to publish aggregated posts in the morning so they can spend the rest of their day on their other projects. A hands-on editor, Poole sends out stories he wants the Post to cover to Michelle Gotthelf, the digital editor-in-chief, according to one staffer familiar with the process.
No media strategy that involves forcing reporters to pump out seven articles a day is going to be successful in the longterm.
First, it doesn’t take long for this to lead to high employee churn, with some of your most talented writers getting burnt out and leaving for greener pastures. It then becomes more difficult to hire veteran reporters, and you’re forced to hire journalists straight out of college, which requires a lot more hand-holding (I was terrible at my first newspaper job for at least six months).
Second, with that level of output, you’re bound to make more mistakes. The Post has never been a bastion of prestige journalism, but it’s produced some especially terrible reporting over the last year, to the point where I finally blocked the newspaper on Twitter.
Third, I just don’t think it’s a good business model. With news aggregation, you’re basically playing the viral lottery, hoping that every 10th article or so takes off on Facebook or Google, resulting in surges in traffic. This type of stuff has a high bounce rate and engenders very little in reader loyalty. This makes it more difficult to sell direct advertising and might even cause media buyers to blacklist your site in their programmatic ad buys. Before you know it, you’re mostly serving up remainder ads at incredibly low CPMs.
Insider reports that the Post is now profitable. Let’s see how well that holds once Chrome phases out browser cookies.
The art of accepting slow growth
Newsletter Crew published an interview with Walter Hickey, the writer behind the newsletter Numlock News. I really liked this quote from him on why creators should learn to accept slow growth:
The thing that I’ve learned is to keep it on the longview. Listen: Plateaus mean that you’re not going up, but they also mean that you’re not going down. The nice thing about the newsletter business is that’s okay too. For me, I’ve been able to sustain growth, and I’ve been happy that it is slow and steady. This isn’t a get rich quick scheme, it's a long term audience built over time.
Sometimes somebody is going to write a nice thing about you and they have a substantial enough audience that a few people sign up, and that is very cool. There’s nothing you can do to make that happen other than to continue working on making a good product.