Sweet, sweet research proves what I’ve been shouting about for a while now; this study took a look at what people react to (and email), essentially hoping to quantify why some articles go viral while others just sit there:
People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.
Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.” […]
“Science kept doing better than we expected,” […] “We anticipated that people would share articles with practical information about health or gadgets, and they did, but they also sent articles about paleontology and cosmology. You’d see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision.”
Wait, wait, wait. I thought the answer to today’s problems in media were to shorten the article, dumb it down, and pack as much advertising (preferably blinking or animated) into the entirely theoretical “above the fold” space while also requiring innumerable “next page” clicks such that any still-sufficiently-interested reader would be so challenged to identify actual content that he or she would drop into a rage-seizure of some kind. Huh. Consider me gobsmacked. They continue:
To make sense of these trends in “virality,” the Penn researchers tracked more than 7,500 articles published from August 2008 to February 2009. They assessed each article’s popularity after controlling for factors like the time of day it was published online, the section in which it appeared and how much promotion it received on the Web home page.
A random sample of 3,000 of these articles was rated by independent readers for qualities like providing practical value or being surprising. The researchers also used computer algorithms to track the ratio of emotional words in an article and to assess the relative positivity or negativity.
[…]
More emotional stories were more likely to be e-mailed, the researchers found, and positive articles were shared more than negative ones. Longer articles generally did better than shorter articles, although Dr. Berger said that might just be because the longer articles were about more engaging topics. (The best way to test that, he said, would be for The Times to run shorter and longer versions of the same article that would be seen by different readers.)
Emphasis added by me to highlight the thing I want most: variably dimensioned articles. Got 15 seconds on the subway and just want the USAToday bullet? Here it is. Need an explainer that goes long on the various competing pieces of the legislation. Here it is. Want 10,000 words on the complete history of this movement in the United States. Here it is. Want a slideshow about the effects of doing/not doing this? Here it is. Want a video depicting those most affected? Here it is.
This sort of thing is not necessarily easy, and it’s certainly not free. But they’re doing a chunk of it already; they just don’t tie it together very well because they universally see themselves as, first and foremost, being in the dead-tree distribution business. The first newsroom with a national imprimatur that successfully enacts this can charge whatever they want. Eventually. The first hit is always, and must always be free. Wonder why the NYT paywall is going to work that way. Fascinating.
Lemkin 