A couple of articles I’ve read over the past week caught my eye.
The first was Chadwick Matlin’s piece on “A Faustian Bargain” in the Columbia Journalism Review. Matlin discusses the editorial use of slideshows as a form of online journalism that can generate a massive number of pageviews simply by clicking through each slide. He opens with a great example: A site he worked for, thebigmoney.com, reached its parent company’s pageview goal by offering up slideshows that eventually provided 40 percent of the site’s traffic.
Efforts such as these provided a revelation for Matlin:
We weren’t alone. Across the web, slideshows have become a shortcut to better traffic numbers; a shortcut that sites are now going out of their way to take. And increasingly they’re published because of the medium, not the message.
In addition, Emma Heald (for editorsweblog.org) wrote a take to Matlin’s piece, further discussing the editorial use of slideshows. Are news organizations using them responsibly, or simply as a means of generating pageviews?
It is easy to see why news organizations would want to use slideshows. They’re relatively easy to build and simple to view. They generate clicks with little to no effort, and they can inflate pageview numbers at a staggering rate compared to the average news story. Matlin mentions how sites such as The Huffington Post have turned slideshows into tools of solicitation, meant only to drive pageview counts high and make their web properties more appealing to advertisers.
I find this discussion interesting, mainly because as a web producer at azcentral.com, one of my main duties is to create and manage slideshows. On average, I will tend to 2-3 slideshows per night, whether I’m creating them or adding/deleting photos from others. Most of the time, I’m tending to game slideshows, but other times we’ll manage “Best of” slideshows or other special-interest galleries.
Building visual presentations with meaning
So working with slideshows is an integral part of my job. So what makes what I do different from simple solicitation? It really comes down to two things: 1) The creative process behind the slideshow and 2) the presentation of it.
I’ve written in a previous blog post about taking print content and telling it visually online (see #3). At azcentral.com, we largely do this through the use of the “super slideshow,” which is like our normal slideshows but with two stark differences: A larger presentation of each photo when you choose to remove the caption information, and more editorial content on each slide (usually by a beat writer). Here’s one example that looks back on the Arizona Cardinals’ loss on Sunday.
The intention of these “super slideshows” is to present editorial content in a visually appealing way. It’s meant to turn regular print stories into finger food online, which quick bites of information that each come with a photo to provide visuals. While these days, the possibilities are endless in how you can present information, particularly on the news side, building these slideshows are simple and can easily enhance content for online viewers.
In other words, the right intention is there from an editorial standpoint. You can make a case that these presentations can drive up pageviews, and they do, but they also give our online product value because they tell the same story in a different way. As long as it’s intuitive, it works.
In addition, there are times where we take regular slideshows and use them in creative ways. Take this slideshow, for example. I built this earlier in the week to showcase the week’s biggest football matchups on television. Would you rather view this in the way it’s presented or as a text-heavy list?
Finding value with unique pageviews
Either way you spin the argument, regular pageviews are a grossly overrated statistic. It surprises me that advertisers still continue to find value in them. I could generate 100 “pageviews” by clicking through all 100 slides of a slideshow, but I don’t do the advertiser any good if I don’t pay any attention to their advertisement above the slides. In all actuality, the 99 extra pageviews don’t mean anything anyway if I clicked the ad on the first pageview!
Perhaps the value of a site’s content lies in the eyes of the advertiser, since it’s their money that makes the news operation click (for the most part). But if I’m trying to build a site’s value, my job shouldn’t just be to increase pageviews (I say “just” because pageviews are still a good general barometer of a site’s traffic, just not the greatest). The real value lies in how many people are viewing my site (i.e. unique pageviews). Matlin writes on this, from the advertiser’s perspective:
Advertisers have an easy way to hold sites accountable: rely on unique visitor, rather than page-view, counts. The page-view metric has become diluted by editorial and business tricks like recirculation tools, landing pages, and slideshows. As Gawker Media owner Nick Denton puts it, “Some page views are worth more than others.” That’s why he now judges his staff and sites’ success on a less-manipulated number: how many people come to visit, not how many pages they visit once they’re there.
So the question should be: How do I get more people to look at my slideshows? That’s what a web desk of a newsroom should be asking. And most of the time, it’s as simple as putting more value behind the product and thinking outside the box in terms of presentation.
Economics 101, really.
Posted by Brian Manzullo at November 24, 2010
Journalism