Taming the Spirit of the Times

On most news organ­isa­tions’ websites, you’ll find a widget called ‘most read’, ‘most shared’ or ‘most com­mented’, possibly all three. The Guardian’s Zeitgeist exper­i­ment suggests an inter­esting alternative.

Typically, the content found in the most-​​X sections provides a salutary — if depressing — reminder of humanity’s baseness and stu­pidity. What tends to get flagged is not ‘Picasso ret­ro­spective opens at the ICA’ or ‘Proposed Amendments to Digital Economy Bill’: it’s ‘foot­baller shags team-mate’s wife’. If you’re seeking the Wisdom of Crowds, look away now.

Here’s the latest from the BBC:

Even worse is the equi­valent list from the Telegraph:

Not to mention the Daily Mail:

Oh dear, oh dear. Showbiz, trivia, sport, sex and weird­ness. And these aren’t tabloid pub­lic­a­tions. The Telegraph, in par­tic­ular, paints itself as a serious business and politics paper with a concern for moral values. Its readers, on the other hand, appear to prefer sex scandals and weird animals. I can’t imagine its editors are espe­cially proud of these results but ulti­mately have to shrug and be grateful for the extra page-​​views.

The Guardian has a similar widget, which isn’t as lowlife as the examples above, but again favours the funny and the odd.

Newspapers and news organ­isa­tions are in a strange position with regard to these most-​​popular lists. The short-​​term value is that they flag up the items that new visitors are most likely to click on and enjoy. They get more page views out of their visitors and thus more advert­ising inventory to sell. They help the organ­isa­tion bolster their claims to advert­isers that their sites are busy and popular. Readers get what they want quickly and leave happily.

On the other hand. There’s a long term devalu­ation coming out of this for serious papers. When they sell to advert­isers, they aren’t just selling so-​​many million eyeballs much of the time. They’re selling a certain quality of read­er­ship and par­tic­ular brand values. For readers, there’s a similar brand attach­ment. They go to a serious news site because they trust the brand and want serious coverage. If they then end up then clicking on the story about a funny-​​looking gorilla, then that’s their own affair. Maybe, ration­ally, they should have gone to weirdanimalpix.com, but they don’t see them­selves as the sort of person who does that.

What’s more. Papers don’t really have an ad-​​inventory problem. They generate thou­sands of new pages and hundreds of thou­sands of impres­sions a day and rarely sell more than 20% of what they have to offer. The only real reason for driving page views is the arms-​​war between the Nationals over who is the most popular. And being the most popular isn’t a great argument to advert­isers if you are sim­ul­tan­eously claiming that your read­er­ship rep­res­ents an elite, as is likely for any serious news site.

So maybe it’s a good idea to find a middle-​​ground; a way for serious news organ­isa­tions’ websites to high­light popular items that doesn’t make them look like a zoo for morons: for readers or advert­isers. The Guardian’s Zeitgeist – launched today – is one attempt to find that middle ground.

The idea is that it blends populism and curation. The most popular stories will appear on the grid, as you’d expect, BUT:

• The dif­ferent sections of the site – news, features, opinion, sport, etc. — remain balanced in the pro­por­tions con­ceived by the editors. So if 90% of its visitors are looking at Sports stories, it still only occupies 2–3 slots on the grid.
• Like is compared with like. For example, Charlie Brooker’s satir­ical swipes at popular media are per­en­ni­ally popular on the site, but will only hit the grid if a par­tic­ular column is more popular than the norm.

Guardian com­munities editor Meg Pickard explains:

…we’re ana­lysing and com­bining all sorts of things; where people come from, where they go to next, how long they stay on a par­tic­ular page, if the page is getting passed round twitter and other social websites, number (and rate) of comments and so on.

We’re taking a range of these vari­ables — enough that a single data­point doesn’t skew the results — and mushing (that’s the tech­nical term) them all together to get a value of “Zeitgeistiness” (another tech­nical term) for each content object.

But — and this is the important bit — each content object only gets compared to other items in the same section, which in real terms means that Football articles only get compared to other Football articles, Technology blo­g­posts against other Technology blo­g­posts and so on. In fact, we go one step further, and take the type of article and day of week into con­sid­er­a­tion: an Environment gallery on a Monday only gets compared to others of the same type/​section also pub­lished on Mondays. Because we’ve been storing and ana­lysing this data overnight for a while now, we’ve got a good baseline to work from.

It’s early days for the Zeitgeist exper­i­ment, and I’m afraid it’s rather buried away from most visitors to the site, so it will be hard for them to see how popular the idea plays out compared to the regular ‘most-​​read/​commented/​shared’ widget. Nonetheless, it’s an inter­esting project that shows how news organ­isa­tions might protect their brand at the same time as playing to the cheap seats.

picture credit: Joi

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