How Huffington Post's Clever Traffic-Generation Machine Works | Hacker News Reader

How Huffington Post's Clever Traffic-Generation Machine Works

mondaynote.com

65 pointszacharye22 comments

I once headed up content marketing for a small online publisher. It's a horrible job. You spend half your day trying to come up with clever headlines of an article you've at-best skimmed and the other half trying to game traffic sources like reddit or fark or harassing other sites for a back-link. Content is too cheap. Supply is enormous (huf po alone does 1000 posts a day!). So, it's a race to the bottom with everyone producing crap. It'll eventually get so bad that a larger market will open up for for-pay content like the nytimes where you're guaranteed some level of quality. I think the traditional pubs who can weather the storm will do just fine once we reach this point.

May be what we need are new discovery tools? currently search engines, and social media are the main discovery tools. I think that the long tail is longer than it would "need" to be. There are excellent resources but difficult to find.

I can think of new tools that can help:

- Sentiment analysis for the masses implemented by a major search engine

- Focused Web Crawlers

- Tools to analyze authority in small communities. Currently authority rankings give information about high popularity

reminds me a bit of the Ali G clip where he suggests a newspaper headline be "WAR BEGINS" on the front page, and "with a w" on the following page

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H6OULO5R4Y

http://www.theonion.com/articles/huffington-post-employee-su...

Let's see how many more Facebook reposts the hufpo title gets.

(yeah, i consider that the dumbest metric ever. Only even looked at by bloggers and creative ad agencies who are clueless about market research)

It's rather unfair to use "number of comments" as a metric to compare between sites. HuffPo has a culture of commenting and community while WSJ does not.

WSJ has, from what I've seen of it, anyway, a thriving community of lively and animated discussion... as long as they post an article about President Obama or the Democrats.

After all, at the height of the Fourth Estate’s power, the population was better informed than today’s Facebook cherry-pickers.

I want to take issue with that statement. I see it repeated in many places, but usually it has either anecdotal evidence, or, in this case, no evidence to back it up. Was the population better informed when traditional newspapers were at their peak (let's say from 1900 to 1960)? How would you measure such an ambiguous term like "informed"? I think there's a lot of unanswered questions about the "informedness" of the average person, and it's not at all clear that the average person was more informed, in any sense, during the height of newspaper dominance than they are today.

Let's also not forget that newspapers were often just as "bad" (in terms of publishing trivial stories or publishing biased stories) as the Huffington Post is today. You just need to look at the history of "yellow journalism" to see it.

Empirical evidence aside, do you think a publishing model like HuffPo's can possibly produce an informed populace? There's very little fact checking, no followup if they get their facts wrong, and most of it's probably just reworded press releases from PR lackeys anyhow.

And how is that different from the "yellow journalism" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century? If anything, the situation is a lot better now since the barriers around publishing are much much lower than they were back then. I fail to see how Ariana Huffington is any worse at journalism than Pulitzer, Hearst, or, say, Murdoch.

Who is right? Who can look to the better future in the digital world ? Is it the virtuous author carving language-smart headlines or the aggregator generating eye-gobbling phrases thanks to high tech tools? Your guess. Maybe it’s time to wake-up.

I suspect most of this is related to the pride of journalists have in delivering a solid product. Questioning this is similar to asking why not all news stations follow the example of FOX or MSNBC, because hey, they are successful. Or why Woody Allen is making the same old boring movies, and that he should instead switch over into producing reality formats as they are are much cheaper to produce and probable getting at least similar viewer ratings. I personally have to say that I dislike the rewriting practice, but then again it has been always a core component of journalism.

There is something to be said about not giving too much control to the algorithms when it comes to the news. HuffPo is loud, obnoxious, and frankly it aggregates a lot of garbage. I'm glad we still have news sources like the NYTimes, BBC, and WaPo that are more curated and subdued and not quite so optimized for ads and SEO.

Like no one else, the HuffPo masters eye-grabbing headline such as these : Watch Out Swimmers: Testicle-Eating Fish Species Caught in US Lake (4,000 Facebook recommendations), or: Akron Restaurant Owner Dies After Serving Breakfast To Obama (3300 comments) or yesterday’s home:LEPAGE LOSES IT: IRS ‘THE NEW GESTAPO’ displayed in a 80 points font-size

IMO, this is not something to be proud of.

HuffPo is a great money making site and a great entertainment site. It is a terrible news site.

How/why is the HP allowed to repost content that isn't theirs?

They aren't reposting the WSJ's editorial, they're writing a blog post about the article.

yeah but they quote large tracts of material

I'm not sure what you're getting at. I take it you think they should not be allowed to quote as much from the source? Or is it their motivation for quoting that bothers you?

The way they can do this legally is fair use:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

The question of how much they can excerpt is a good one, and I presume HuffPo's answer to that is, "As much as we can get away with."

'fair use'

selective quoting of a few key lines and rephrasing of a paragraph or two fall within the bounds of fair use.

The other sites are also behind a pay wall and have a different monetization strategy so looking at comment counts may not be the best comparison. That's not to say that HuffPo's titles are not eye-catching but it may explain a bit of the differences in the number of comments.

I don't know if that title's catchy enough. Here, I summarized the article in 300 words and rewrapped it for you:

Inside Huffington Post’s traffic machine: the algorithm that’s killing traditional media http://benwerd.com/blog/2012/07/09/inside-huffington-posts-t...

Does anyone know where they pull there SEO data? Are all the sites doing this sort of thing using their own bespoke SEO algorithms or are there third party API solutions for this market? If not, that could be a valuable service.

Nothing new about brown press.

A little demodé even.

And i bet $5 nobody here ever landed on it's pages.

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