local media insider

Paid links yield $20,000 a month for New York Times Regional group

Alisa Cromer
Posted
A pop-up bubble from the "What's this?" link explains that the outbound links are paid.
The links as they appear (please click to enlarge) under the story, above the comments box. Note that comments required a Facebook log-in. This widget was under an article in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune's site.
Photo


Company:
New York Times Regional Media Group (NYTRMG)
Traffic: About 20,000,000 page views
Key executive: Dan Shorter, Vice President Digtial Media

Challenge: New York Times Regional Media Group wanted to increase traffic and inventory in its 16 local daily newspaper sitess ranging from from Sonoma, California to Sarasota, Florida. After spending thousands on "related story" technology, they wanted to find a less expensive and more effective way to direct readers to additional content they would be interested in.

Strategy:  The solution they chose is a partner, called Outbrain, which deploys a widget at the bottom of articles to deliver related story links. The box includes both inbound links, and paid outbound links, so not only is the technology free, but also generates revenues. 

How it works
Outbrain first indexes the content on the site so that stories can be related and fed via the customizeable widget. 

Then publisher adds a line of code to pages where the widget should load - anywhere on a page, although the bottom of articles has the best response, Shorter told us. 

Unlike “ related stories” the inbound links are titled “You might be interested in” to show how user preferences are followed, more like Amazon or Netflix, using an algorithm that includes “people who read this also read” factor. Stories become “personalized for users, increasing relevancy and interest.” And thus, traffic.

At the bottom of a recent Sarasota Herald-News story on a deadly car wreck,for example, was this link “Report: Python that killed 5 year old girl was hungry.” This correlation of interest in weird quirky news may be impossible to achieve with a standard tagging system.

(Nevertheless, skimming through a number of articles on the site, and the "you might be interested in" list of stories has some odd pairings. The proof is in the traffic increase).

Paid, outbound links
Another site of four to fives links entitled "From around the web" take the readers to stories from publishers who buy the traffic, on a revenue share basis. The original publisher can block sites and/or specific articles by simply clicking on the a red “x” on the back end.

The paid links are also less precisely targeted; current "From around the web" links from the same car wreck story include content partners like EHow and CNBC’s more commercial channels (think health, rather than hard news). Another story yielded a Colgate-produced or sponsored health news story - clearly not  competing content.

But, since the revenue is derived from the outbound links, there is no cost to publishers and even some revenue gains.  Readers do seem to want "something else to do" when they finish reading. It works.

Editors did not object to the paid outbound links for two reasons; first, because the links were clearly identified as paid (see the "what's this?" pop up in the second image to the right, click to enlarge) and second, because the overall traffic increase was so substantial.

Results

NYT Regional Media Group seeing reports a 7% increase in traffic from  the in-bound  links, an additional 2 to 4 million page views per month across the group since implementation. They also report that older related-content also surfaces providing additional value to archives.

The widget also generating almost $20,000 per month across group. Dan Shorter says. The metrics runs about $3,000 a month per 10 million page views,so that should give you an idea of what deploying this on a smaller group or single site will achieve. 

Other newspapers which have using this model include Boston Globe, USA Today, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News and Slate.


Lessons learned

1. Not enough attention is given to the "bottom of the page" of articles where the reader is left looking for more. This looks like an easy, free way to increase traffic, and boost revenues. While the metrics are not huge, across a network of smaller sites - who need the traffic most - the numbers add up quickly.

2. A number of good solutions actually pay the publisher; Outbrain is one of these. The other one that comes to mind is Civic Science, which not only provides deep audience data, via an entertaining poll with three questions controlled by publishers, but also pays a share of data sales to national brands. Since the publisher owns all the data, this is a better than free way to collect information than expensive surveys. 

3. Also a the "bottom of the page" are article comments via Facebook log-in. This approach, rather than fake names or anonymous posting, is becoming more popular among local media companies. "Using Facebook cleans up the conversation and for many saves time spent in moderating. Mindless, anonymous chatter makes no money and isn't something journalists usually like. Facebook commenting seems to have increased traffic about 7 percent," Shorter said. 

4. Spend more time with vendors - they are your partners. We first ran into Outbrain on the exhibit hall of the 2010 NAA MediaXChange and included it in a brief round-up of the "best of the best" from the show. However, a year later, a surprisingly few number of media companies have explored this  option,  which is not only free, but profitable. 

We see paid outbound links as an optimal solution for networks of local sites which collctively have a large base of traffic, but need to improve the traffic of individual sites. 

Thanks to Dan Shorter, Vice President of Digital Media at the NYTRMG, for sharing these metrics with us and for NAA for bringing Shorter to the 2011 MediaXchange. 

Alisa Cromer

The author, Alisa Cromer is publisher of a variety of online media, including LocalMediaInsider and  MediaExecsTech,  developed while on a fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute and which has evolved into a leading marketing company for media technology start-ups. In 2017 she founded Worldstir.com, an online magazine,  to showcases perspectives from around the  world on new topic each month, translated from and to the top five languages in the world.

outbrain, paid links, NYTRMG