spark 2016: growing your digital audience

Growing Your Digital Audience

Ari Isaacman Bevacquaari@nytimes.com Spark, by TrackmavenMay 2016

The New York Times

How the Times is using data to inform our audience developmentwhile maintaining our editorial judgment

How do you growyour digital audience?

You probably already know to…

Optimize for social.

Optimize your product and

your publication processes.

Measure everything.

Test everything.

Learn constantly.

Keep it agile!

Optimize for mobile.

Optimize for search.

What’s missing from this slide?

Optimize for social.

Optimize your product and

your publication

and distribution processes.

Measure everything.

Test everything.

Learn constantly.

Optimize for mobile.

Optimize for search.

Editorial Judgment

How do you grow your digital audience, in a way that is

informed by data, but ruled by editorial judgment?

Create, communicate and use

guiding principles for data in your

newsroom.

Guiding principles:1. Editorial judgment comes first2. Context is critical3. Don’t treat numbers like a scorecard4. We are data-informed, but not data-

driven; our mission of great journalism remains unchanged

How do these guiding principles work in real

life?

Instead of reporters and editors asking

“Did it do good?”

We are designing experiments with

editorial and audience goals in mind.

For a story about the culture at Amazon we hoped to inspire an engaging

discussion among readers.And we broke the record for

the most comments ever on a Times story (5,858).

For the first Republican debate, we wanted to drive readers our Slack-

powered live chat.We had one of our largest liveblog audiences ever.

When Nick Kristof and Adam Ellick traveled to Angola to tell the story of the

world’s deadliest place for kids we wanted to over-index for readers in

Angola. We worked with a leading Portuguese new outlet to embed our video on their homepage, reaching a significantly higher percentage of readers in

Angola than usual.

PLAN experiments with both audience and editorial goals outlined

DO your experiments, measuring along the way

ASSESS & LEARN from your outcomes, discussing both audience and editorial goals and sharing these

learnings across teams

Plan, do, assess & learn