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