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	About zez

Not so Dead Content

Author: Paul Kenneth Egell-Johnsen

Publishing date: 14.02.2001 14:42

If you keep a tab on what people read and don't read, then you'll be able to find out what your most valuable content is. This isn't just a simple "10.000 read that article and 400 read that article", since that last article might have been written when the site was young and you only had 400 subscribers. You need to keep an eye on market penetration. The market is your subscribers, and the penetration is the percentage of subscribers who have read an article. This also have to be numbers used at the time of publication.

So, what if we have the above two articles? If your site has 20 000 subscribers, then the second article, read by only 400 people, is the article with the best market penetration, 100%, vs. 50% on the newer article. You also know that 19 600 people haven't read that old article. The obvious solution is to link to that old article! Now you have something which hopefully most of your readers will appreciate, which they haven't already read, and which didn't cost you extra.

Furthermore, perhaps the article needs brushing up? Have there been later developments? Could it need a rewrite? Well, consider both, and when you have that new article up, link to the old article from that. Keeping up with developments also show that you're interested in what you write, not only for its immediacy or current popularity, but also unto the more longer lasting issues of the writings. This is valuable for your image, it builds your image, gives your readers some indication of what you do, like and care about. In short it is part of building yourself as a brand.

You might also receive reader feedback on a piece, this can shed some light on a story, and might justify another followup. Reader feedback is important, it tells you what people like and dislike. A good article might merit a discussion in your forums, it might be that this will elicit even more reader feedback.

Also, keeping a tab on current discussions on your site might be insightful when judging what your audience care about. If there are particularly fierce discussions going on, you need to grab hold of them and write something about it, bringing more people into it.

By enabling discussions connected directly to articles you can also spur more usage of your site. Expanding on that theme you could add polls to the article as well, which can further discussion when people see the results.

And how about adding subscriptions to specific events, categories and articles? If people reads an article they might be interested in getting notices when there are follow ups to the original. Use the knowledge gained to your advantage.

Word of mouth is also a good thing for your articles, you should add "tip a friend" functionality to your main parts of the site. Then a reader can easily add an e-mail address and send that article to a friend. Note, this method might be forbidden in some countries.

Sometimes an article might not be a clear cut sports article or politics, it might belong to different categories. Cross posting to relevant categories on your site might bring the article to the attention of people who might otherwise overlook the article.

The front page, or main section pages might also be a good place for that article which you want to spotlight. You might also create a "most popular" list based on penetration of the articles you have. Thus the articles which were valuable to your users will appear high on that list.

Finally, there might be articles you've written which didn't work at all. Try a rewrite, find a better hook, a different angle, something which will draw people in.

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Comment List

Topic:	Author:	Time:
A few more things	Marius Sundbakken	19.02.2001 00:09
As you mention, showing the current discussions going on is a good way to draw more attention. zez should do this too. For example, on the front page, there's a "Read more" link for each article. Why not show when the last comment was added? This shows that it's not just a static, "dead" page. In zez's case, I doubt many people browse through the forums each time they visit the site to see if anything is going on. Too slow! Too much trouble. Consequence? The forum die out, they loose belief. If someone sees that nothing is going on there, why should she bother to write anything there if no-one reads it anyway?
Create "subcommunities"	Marius Sundbakken	15.02.2001 20:07
I know many people hate Amazon.com, but looking at their site from a pure "community view" I think they have something very good and interesting. Firstly, they create recommendations based on what you've rated. Loved a particular author or like a particular subject? Get recommendations based on that! There are several ways to do this. Other people that liked what you liked may share your taste. Let their taste be part of deciding what to recommendation (through some algorithm). This will create some kind of "subcommunities" within a larger community (I guess they're all just communities). People who like jazz music will automatically get recommendations from other jazz lovers, and heavy metal lovers won't (in general) be affected by this as they will have their own little community. This brings life to the site. The items are pretty much stable ("dead content"), but they can be hard to find as there are so many. By having this dynamic recommendation system, you add life to the content. Adding review possibility and the possibility to rate the reviews, create top reviewers charts (vanity charts) etc. These are ways to go to create interesting sites bringing people back again and again. Obviously, not everything that applies to a site such as Amazon.com applies to all other sites, but it's a site to learn from, I think. I guess most of this is obvious, but, well, have a look.
RE: Create	Paul Kenneth Egell-Johnsen	16.02.2001 14:38
One thing which www.epinions.com does is to always present the reviews of people who have posted many reviews, and good reviews. The ratings, the number of reviews, and which fields they appear in, is used as a basis for giving trust. The next step is to say to the software that I usually find this guy informative, this guy less informativ, and please, if this guy likes it, I don't want it. On Amazon you can click on a reviewer (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/cm/member-reviews/-/A1PP6TSNECELE4/1/ref=cm_mp_rv/103-4889218-9873416) and read other reviews of that reviewer. The same on epionion. That's a great method of finding out more about the reviewer; you can quicly see if it's a fluke that his review is so good, or if you actually seem to like the same as him. The problem with such a system is that it needs a lot of people to work; most people don't care to write reviews; thus those who do must produce more, or you must have a very large group of people to poll your reviewers from. I suspect that national sites for small languages (Norwegian, Swedish, etc) won't be as successful due to the limited user base. But your observation is correct, and an oversight from my side not to include this in the article:)
RE: RE: Create	Marius Sundbakken	16.02.2001 19:51
Yes, a very large user base is required for the systems at Amazon (and, I guess, at Epinions) to work. However, you one might try to apply something similar at a smaller scale. Adding a simple vote/grade system to "an item" on a site can help even for small sites. Check http://www.photoforum.ru (down at the time of writing) which is a small community, but I still think the rating system works well. Take a larger site in the same field, e.g. http://www.foto.no and http://www.photocritique.net, which does not have a similar rate system. All of these sites are relatively small, but the Russian one is definitely smallest. Interestingly, it is the one with the most advanced rating system, and I think that makes the Russian one a better user experience than the two other ones. So, your suspicion about smaller sites, especially non-English ones, may be somewhat unjustified. For something as time consuming as reviews, you're right. Here, I've pointed to both Russian (although it's also English) and Norwegian sites. I find the trust metric concept used at Advogato (http://www.advogato.org) interesting. This can probably be applied to many not-so-big sites.