data day - growing your digital audience
TRANSCRIPT
Growing Your Digital Audience The New York Times
How the Times is using data to inform our audience development while maintaining our editorial judgment
Ari Isaacman Astles | @Ari_NYT | [email protected] | October 2015 | Lesbians Who Tech NYC
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.
How do you grow your digital audience, in a way that is informed by data, but
ruled by editorial judgment?
Guiding Principles:
1. Editorial judgment comes first
2. Context is critical
3. Don’t treat numbers like a scorecard
4. We are data-informed, but not data-driven; our mission of great journalism remains unchanged
We are discussing both editorial and audience goals
to enable a complex and nuanced discussion of
outcomes.
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 to 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 news outlet to embed our video on their homepage, reaching a significantly higher
percentage of readers in Angola than usual.