Articles by: "Nick Lioudis, Content Manager—Chartbeat"

We’ve spent the past several months analyzing the impact of Covid-19 on audience engagement throughout the world. With a few months’ worth of engagement data available, we wanted to take a deeper look into answering the following questions in the context of the crisis:

How much are people reading? Namely, has their engagement risen or fallen in any significant way and how that engagement has changed over time with the rise and fall of case numbers.
Where are readers finding content?
Which content, and which types of content, have readers found most engaging during this period?

For this analysis, our Data Science team reviewed more than 175 billion pageviews from the beginning of the year across 56 million articles, about 7 million of which were about Covid-19.

Traffic and consumption patterns among audiences

First, we analyzed consumption patterns in terms of the total number of articles published each day on Covid. We saw a small rise in the number of articles as the crisis began to grow internationally. Then there was a huge peak in coverage in mid-March, around the time that the U.S. and U.K. announced major policy changes.

That was followed by a 45% decline in the number of coronavirus-related articles between that mid-March peak and the end of May.

We then looked at consumption patterns among audiences (seen in the graph above), the overall traffic numbers, broken out by pageviews on non-Covid articles and Covid articles, show that:

Journalists were covering coronavirus before it truly caught the public’s attention. There were more than 7,000 articles per day published on Covid starting at the beginning of February, but our data shows that audiences weren’t paying attention until the very end of the month.
Traffic and coverage peaked at the same time, the second and third weeks of March.
Traffic has declined faster than traffic, with a nearly 60% decline in traffic from peak to the end of May.

The latter point aligns with our assessment that consumption patterns in recent months have suggested the onset of reader fatigue.

How reader behaviors varied in certain regions

Our next step was to see if country trends reflected those patterns, so we analyzed engagement across countries where we were able to get data about new cases.

In the U.S., we saw that people started reading about Covid-19 significantly before new cases were exploding. The peak day for traffic on coronavirus stories was 36 days before the peak day of new cases.

Yet, engagement with Covid stories has waned at a much faster pace than actual cases — new cases have only declined 20%, while traffic has declined about 80%.

In Europe, we saw a similar pattern of engagement peaking before new cases reach highs, but we saw greater alignment between engagement and the fall in cases.

Readers in Brazil were only engaged around the same time that other countries peaked.

Google properties, Facebook referred most traffic

When dove into the referral data, Google Search and Facebook saw significant jumps in traffic.

When we looked at the total volume of search traffic to Google, we saw a massive rise in mid-March — more than 60% or 200 million daily pageviews. In the case of Facebook, traffic also grew significantly, to the tune of 35%, or 70 million daily pageviews.

This change in traffic, with a greater percentage of traffic coming from search, is in line with what we typically see during major news events, where readers more often rely on search to seek out relevant information. However, we usually think about that phenomenon on the shorter timelines that are usually associated with breaking news events. Because Covid coverage has been prominent for several months, it’s notable that the dominance of Google Search as a traffic source has been sustained over time.

What’s more, the growth of traffic from just these two sources accounts for about half of the increase in traffic to publisher sites, with the other half coming from an increase in direct traffic.

Google News and Twitter also each saw 60-70% increases in the volume of traffic during this period. When you think about our previous understanding of how audiences find information via search over social, Twitter’s rise is especially notable.

Did audiences engage for longer periods? Our data says yes

When we looked at overall engagement, we saw that visitors spent 35% of their time on coronavirus-related articles in March, falling to 20% in May. While that breakdown may seem surprising to news consumers, our global dataset includes sites that fall outside of news, say sports or entertainment, which shows us that audiences were still spending time on non-Covid content as well.

We then looked at Average Engaged Time, we saw that readers spent 34% more time on Covid articles than non-Covid articles. This matters because this behavior points to more than a click. It demonstrates sustained engagement with the content.

How readers engaged with certain types of content

We also wanted to see if audiences favored certain content structures over others. Therefore, we analyzed the top 100 Covid-related stories by Total Engaged Time and categorized them into articles (traditional, short-form narratives), infographics/interactives, live blogs, and longform pieces.

About half of the top 100 pages were articles. For live blogs, they only accounted for 39% of the top 100 list. However, they drive almost half of all engagement, showing that this frequently-updated format has resonated well with readers. Additionally, infographics and longform content were among the top pieces by engagement.

When we delved further into their referral sources, we saw that articles received traffic from various traffic sources, while live blogs were most popular via homepages, which we classify as “internal” traffic in Chartbeat. Infographics performed best on search, while long-form pieces were a hit on social media platforms.

What the data tells us about the past, present, and future of audience behaviors

Let’s take a step back and answer the questions posed at the beginning of this piece and what they mean for content producers:

How much people are reading?

The publishing community began covering the pandemic ahead of the uptick in reader engagement. While the volume of coverage has been sustained, it has also outpaced the volume of traffic. That said, this traffic is still higher than pre-pandemic levels.

However, the data suggests the onset of coverage fatigue, which also points to a need for new coverage strategies as the pandemic continues. Our country-by-country analysis shows that traffic tends to climb quickly as the virus spreads, but peaks within days of a lockdown. This illustrates a relationship between engagement and how regional measures are impacting the lives of readers. That said, traffic remains higher-than-usual when compared to pre-pandemic data we’ve analyzed.

Where are readers finding content?

Google and its related entities have been significant referral sources to external traffic to coronavirus-related content, well above Facebook, which in its own right has also referred substantial levels of traffic.

Which content, and which types of content, have readers found most engaging?

Engagement is higher on content that is directly related to coronavirus, but we’ve seen that readers are favoring the up-to-the-minute urgency that live blogs offer.

Therefore, what we can see on the whole is that reader attention, as measured by traffic and engagement, is higher than ever for publishers. The prevailing question, however, is if it will continue to stay that way as the pandemic continues and what, if any, impact it will have on longstanding interactions between audiences and content creators.

Industry-Research

What Chartbeat’s loyalty research says about the future of device, channel strategies

January 29, 2020 Nick Lioudis, Content Manager—Chartbeat

In recent years, global publishers have shifted their focus on the ties that bind loyal readers and their propensity to become subscribers. Therefore, we wanted to better understand loyal reader behaviors, starting with an analysis across devices and distribution channels. Here’s what we found.

Loyal readers no longer tethered to desktops

Believe it or not, loyalty is actually higher on mobile than desktop when we analyze our global publisher data.

Across the board, mobile visitors show more loyalty. We see the accessibility of these devices — a 24/7 window into what’s going on at any moment — driving this trend. This does not mean desktop traffic is going away, it’s just often tethered to a single place (e.g., work or home), whereas your mobile device moves with you all day long.

When looking at weekly visits by traffic sources across mobile and desktop experiences, we saw that app direct visitors are nearly 6x more loyal than platform visitors.

This finding begins to make more sense when you think about publishers’ renewed focus on mobile experiences. Particularly when you consider the fact that the overall number of visits taking place on mobile increased by more than 20%.

Where visitors are finding apps and how it impacts loyalty

Visitors coming to apps via deep links or direct traffic on the web do so three times more often than platform visitors, as we see below. That said, our research found that at this point loyalty is roughly the same when it comes to the major platforms (i.e., Facebook and Google Search).

What our channel loyal findings mean for content creators

“Subscription is an act of loyalty, and readers need some way of developing that loyalty and affinity for a publication before they’re likely to pay,” Josh Schwartz, our Chief of Product, Engineering and Data Science, recently told Nieman Lab on the topic of reader revenue and loyalty. The data we outlined in this piece suggests that publishers are increasingly aware of this journey to develop loyalty, using multiple channels (and increasingly, mobile-first experiences) to grow these relationships over time.

A few other takeaways from the research:

Shift in app experiences suggests new paths to loyalty

The data suggests that loyal readers want a direct path to publishers — a huge indicator that there’s value in improving app and direct to mobile experiences. That being said, friction along the mobile journey poses a massive hurdle in getting even loyal readers to move closer to subscription.

Platforms still have a prominent role in loyal readership

Yes, we’re seeing an interesting shift in visitor patterns that favor direct visits to apps. Yet, loyal readers are still coming from Google or Facebook. Our recent research shows that there’s still a case to keep your platform presence top of mind.

Movement matters when it comes to device-based loyalty

Loyalty among mobile visitors is growing rapidly. This finding makes sense when you think about today’s mobile-first readers. Don’t go abandoning your investments in desktop, especially since we still depend on this experience every day.

Overall, we see that loyalty among mobile visitors is growing rapidly, which makes more sense as we think about today’s mobile-first readers. Moreover, it points to an important shift in audience behavior — loyal readers want a direct path to publishers. This tells us there’s still a massive opportunity to improve app and direct to mobile experiences.

Industry-Research

What this past quarter of engagement data tells us heading into 2020

December 9, 2019 Nick Lioudis, Content Manager—Chartbeat

When we look back at audience engagement insights this year, we confirmed what we’ve known for some time — mobile readership is growing rapidly across the world.

Overall, about 40% of direct visits take place on mobile devices, according to Chartbeat’s global publishing data. As if that weren’t enough to get your distribution strategy in order, we’ve found that poor mobile user experiences could be impacting your ability to drive reader revenue.

This quarter’s snapshot of the global audience engagement landscape points to many of the lessons media and publishing communities can use for strategic planning moving forward. Also, it’s worth taking a look back at our previous international reader engagement data published here earlier this year to see how those trends have evolved in just the past few months.

Africa, Southern Europe see mobile jumps

Mobile pageviews continue to climb in Africa, increasing from 77% to 79% in the past quarter. Mobile readership jumped across the rest of the world as well, notably in Southern Europe, which grew from 61% to 65%.

We previously noted that one of the newest, yet largely unknown, drivers of traffic is coming from mobile-first aggregators. A significant portion of this growth is driven by Google Chrome Suggestions and Google News, which each grew more than 50% this year. Outside of the US, we’ve seen platforms such as TikTok and TopBuzz drive an increasing amount of mobile traffic. Our data tells us to expect more of the same heading into the new year.

Search traffic in Central Asia, China rises

Pageviews coming from search engines continue to climb across Asia compared to last quarter. Search engine traffic in Central Asia is up 2% (now 30%), while China is up 3% (now 29%), and Southeast Asia increased by 1% (now 23%).

Southeast Asia still leads in social pageviews

There’s been something special about social interactions in Southeast Asia throughout 2019. For the third consecutive quarter, this region has made up the greatest share in percent of all pageviews coming from social platforms, holding steady at 31%.

Latin America: Home of the engaged reader

Three quarters in a row, readers across Latin America showed the highest Average Engaged Time at over 34 seconds. Close behind, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. We’re continuing to look into the drivers of growth, but we have seen major innovations among publishers in the region.

Northern Europe loyalty drops, but still tops

Northern European readers have lead loyalty metrics for three straight quarters, with the highest percentage of loyal* pageviews (46%) compared to total pageviews among readers.

This matters — there have been clear lines drawn between reader loyalty and the willingness to subscribe.

Audience engagement insights: This quarter and a look ahead

The themes we’ve seen across global publishers this past quarter align with the broader trends across digital media — we’re in a mobile-first environment that rewards user experiences as much as the quality of content. With the data we’ve outlined in mind, here are a few takeaways that can be taken into 2020:

Strategize for regions and devices. Segmentation is key to reaching new audiences and expanding current readership. The surge in mobile and search traffic across the world can show publishers:

How regions interact with content irrespective of one another.
Where readers are and how they engage with content, which will ultimately benefit their audience development efforts.

Leverage Engaged Time. High Average Engaged Times across the world, particularly in Latin America, present new opportunities to build loyal readers. Our research shows loyal readers consume more content, so optimizing articles to ensure readers are Recirculating will help media companies get the most out of their increased engagement.

There’s still an opportunity to expand your regional audiences by optimizing for the platforms and devices where they interact with content most — this trend will continue into the new year.

And, as mobile engagement continues to grow in influence, this places an even greater emphasis on making small adjustments to your site and digital content. Why? These trends we’re seeing may evolve as reader habits continue to change, but improving audience loyalty is an opportunity that digital content creators can’t afford to lose.

 * A loyal reader is someone who returns to your site in at least 50% of days in a two-week period.

Industry-Research | Perspectives

Mobile aggregators: The opportunity for referral traffic we’re not talking about

October 21, 2019 Nick Lioudis, Content Manager—Chartbeat

Referral traffic to content has risen in recent years due in part to a largely unknown channel — mobile-first aggregators. Here’s what we know about mobile aggregators, why they matter, and importantly, their growing influence over reader traffic.

What is the mobile aggregators story?

Mobile-first aggregators present a growth story — the referral traffic they send to publishers has doubled in the past two years. A significant portion of this growth is driven by Google Chrome Suggestions and Google News, which each grew more than 50% this year (and drives significantly larger shares of referral traffic than Twitter).

The field of global mobile aggregators is also growing. Tokyo-based SmartNews and China-based news aggregator TopBuzz have shown rapid expansion, driving an increasing amount of traffic to sites. More importantly, their growth has changed the traffic landscape. Smartnews and TopBuzz are both now sending as much traffic as Yahoo.

Why content creators should pay attention to mobile aggregators

Digital-first organizations are still in the early stages of understanding the primary drivers of subscriptions. However, effective strategies rely on identifying the behaviors content creators can (and want to) encourage that will ultimately lead to more reader revenue.

From our research thus far, publishers have had far less success in converting readers from mobile-first aggregators compared to more traditional channels such as email. Connecting the dots is crucial.

Therefore, a deeper understanding of mobile-first aggregators can open up a whole new level of engagement, and by extension, a new reader revenue channel.

Next steps: Demystifying mobile aggregators

Based on what we currently know about mobile aggregators, here’s what content creators should keep in mind:

Strategize around these new mobile referral sources

Overall, we see the mobile-first aggregators as more of a missed opportunity than an unsolvable problem. We believe content creators can take advantage of this mostly untapped source of traffic by understanding their unique impact and optimizing content accordingly.

Audience development tactics are needed

For too long, mobile-first aggregators have been categorized as a subset of the larger platforms (i.e., Google search) we know well. However, we believe they should be seen as their own channel, which would get publishers closer to segmenting (and therefore optimizing) key drivers of traffic.

It’s all about attribution

Segmentation of traffic leads to better attribution. The ability to uncover mobile aggregator-specific patterns and better track their impact. Moreover, it can clear the path towards leveraging the channel for higher engagement, loyalty, and conversions.

Our data shows that the growth of mobile-first aggregators has significantly upended the traffic source landscape. Publishers would be remiss to take this shift lightly, as they may be missing out on a major source of referral traffic in the long-term.

This also coincides with a trend we’ve long seen — the fact that mobile-first readers are demanding better experiences. Therefore, it’s unsurprising that aggregators have become this increasingly influential source of traffic.

Industry-Research

Where are the world’s most loyal readers? Hint: It’s not North America

August 20, 2019 Nick Lioudis, Content Manager—Chartbeat

Publishers looking to understand how high reader engagement translates to long-term loyalty in 2019 should look no further than Northern Europe. For consecutive quarters this year, Northern European readers had the highest percentage of loyal pageviews compared to total pageviews, according to data compiled by Chartbeat. (A loyal reader is someone who returns to your site in at least 50% of days in a two-week period.)

We’ve documented how European publishers are experimenting with marketing to highly-engaged readers to take advantage of a short window to convert them to loyal subscribers.

However, the data shows that the Americas create more than enough engaging content that, by all accounts, should translate to higher loyalty figures. For example, readers in Latin America engaged with content for an average of 34.2 seconds, while those in North America engaged for 31 seconds.

What gives? Chartbeat’s second quarter international audience engagement insights indicate it could be emblematic of a broader industry trend: U.S. publishers finding it difficult to leverage strong reader engagement into revenue opportunities.

More on global reader engagement data and trends from the past quarter below.

Africa and Asia drive mobile, social traffic

Mobile traffic has eclipsed desktop across the world, particularly in Africa*, where 77% of all pageviews are from mobile devices. This is closely followed by the Central Asia and Southeast Asia subregions, with 75% and 74% of pageviews coming from mobile, respectively.

Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East made up the greatest share in percent of all pageviews coming from social platforms, driven largely by their high use of Facebook.

By continent, the story remains largely the same as our subregion data. In Asia, 68% of pageviews in Asia come from mobile devices. This is followed by Europe and North America, where it is 61% and 60%, respectively.

Facebook dominates social referrals. The social giant drove over 4.5 billion pageviews for the past quarter. It’s trailed by Twitter, which was responsible for approximately 408 million referrals.

Asia leads referral traffic from search

Central Asia (28%) has the largest percentage of all pageviews coming from search engines, with China (26%) close behind.

Looking at search traffic across all Chartbeat publishers, Google leads by a wide margin at over 10.5 billion referrals this past quarter, according to Chartbeat data.

What this past quarter says about audience engagement

Our global audience engagement data gives publishers a snapshot into broader reader trends that supplement their long-term marketing strategies. Here’s a quick recap of the data:

Europe is loyal. Each of Europe’s subregions tracked by Chartbeat, led by Northern Europe, make up the globe’s most loyal readers. What does this mean? European paid readership models could be one of the first places to look as global publishers attempt to build revenue.

Africa and Asia are mobile (and social). This past quarter reminds us that content consumption via mobile devices is a global trend. Aggregators such as Google Chrome Suggestions and Flipboard are still serving as influential external referral sources. Shore up your mobile experience if you haven’t already done so. The high social referrals in these continents should also prompt publishers to identify regions that are driving social traffic. They should also evaluate whether they’re offering the right content to best engage these audiences.

The Americas are engaged. Readers in Latin America and North America are highly engaged with content. However, they fall on the lower end of the loyalty spectrum compared to the rest of the world. How publishers in the Americas bridge that gap will be key to their goals of unlocking more subscriptions revenue.

*Chartbeat’s dataset in Africa is not broken out by subregion to maintain data integrity

Industry-Research

A Chinese news app is quietly referring millions of pageviews—here’s how global publishers can take advantage

March 11, 2019 Nick Lioudis, Content Manager—Chartbeat

Traffic to your most engaging content can come from unexpected places. Case in point: Chartbeat’s data science team recently found that TopBuzz — a China-based news aggregation app — was responsible for a multi-million spike in pageviews among our publishers late last year.

In December alone, TopBuzz referred almost 34 million pageviews across Chartbeat publishers throughout the world. That’s a 36x increase from January 2017. We also found that about half of the traffic referred by this app comes from the U.S. However, we are increasingly seeing a significant share from countries such as Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK.

Here’s a closer look at TopBuzz referral traffic since 2017 through February, peaking around December of last year:

This traffic spike piqued interest among our partners and, in turn, Chartbeat’s data science team. Therefore, we thought it would be worthwhile to take a deeper dive into this referrer with significant potential to drive engaged readers to publishers.

Here’s why TopBuzz is driving pageviews

So what is TopBuzz and, more importantly, why is it driving so many pageviews to publishers? TopBuzz is one of several digital properties owned by ByteDance, a Chinese startup reportedly valued at $30 billion.

ByteDance had already made its mark in the media landscape with well-known news aggregator app TouTiao, which aptly translates to “HeadLines”. To date, TouTiao was thought to be the primary source of referral traffic to our publishers.

In Android land, TopBuzz sits at number 11 in the free News & Magazines apps on the Android Play Store (as of the time of writing). It’s also ranked 16 in News on the Apple App Store.

How is Chartbeat accounting for this finding?

At Chartbeat, we’re updating our Real-Time Dashboard referrer classifications to more accurately reflect TopBuzz as the true source of external link traffic flowing to publishers, as shown here:

We’ll also surface traffic from other apps owned by ByteDance, which will appear as “News Republic”, “BuzzVideo”, and “Buzz Up!” referrers. This should resolve any confusion surrounding the source of this traffic previously classified as TouTiao, as you see in the image above.

What publishers can do next: Position content for stronger engagement

Our data science team will continue analyzing TopBuzz to get a better sense of its long-term impact on referral traffic to publishers around the world. In the meantime, the more accurate referrer classification is intended to better inform your global audience development strategy. This is similar to knowing traffic is actually coming from “Google News” rather than just “Google”.

An increased familiarity with TopBuzz will give you an opportunity for more internal discussions on how to proactively place your most engaging content front and center for this referral source.

Get to know the ByteDance model

While TopBuzz may be largely unknown in the U.S., TouTiao has been massively popular abroad. As an article in TechNode notes, ByteDance’s core competency is its AI-based system for content creation, curation, and dissemination, which forms the architecture behind all of its apps. This can incentivize content creators through financial rewards often based on clicks, curating content according to the preferences of each individual reader.

However, this may come into conflict publishers’ efforts to resist click-centric content. Therefore, be sure to assess your long-term audience development goals before exclusively tailoring content for TopBuzz.

Keep an eye out for other emerging platforms

Take a lesson from our TopBuzz discovery—we’re in a global media landscape. Couple that with our increasing app usage, and there are potential revenue opportunities for publishers all over the world.

This means that even if optimizing content for TopBuzz isn’t right for you, there are and will be many more opportunities to offer engaging content to new, diverse audiences. And don’t worry, we’re keeping a close eye on new sources of referral traffic every day to make sure you get a heads up.

Su Hang of Chartbeat’s Data Science team contributed research to this article.