Post on 14-Apr-2017
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Homepage strategies from the U.S. capital
• The Washington Post recorded 53.5 million digital unique visitors in July 2015, up 36% from 2014.
• 38 million mobile users (up 58%).
• More than 19.4 million desktop users (up 5%).
• 41% of total digital audience are millennials — a demographic with rising engagement (Post-branded outreach includes Snapchat).
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Homepage: 4 ‘zones’• “In the News” cues a topic’s importance. Nieman
Lab reported in December 2014 that 5-25% of site traffic comes from Google News.
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Top table• The big stories of the day (usually on the left).
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• A set of related stories takes over the entire top when there’s major news.
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• The “feature display,” usually on the right, can be used for a topic that isn’t hard news.
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Newswell (or stream)• This is a mix of news, opinion and features
immediately under the top table. Each of the 8 to 10 items gets prominent headlines, thumbnail art and short descriptive blurbs.
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Downpage• Topic areas that require little human oversight.
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Code name: Rainbow
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Analytics• The Post uses
Chartbeat, including the heads-up display.
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• We regularly check the Chartbeat dashboard for the top 20 trending article pages as a guide, but that’s imperfect.
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What qualifies for washingtonpost.com?• We curate the homepage so it contains content
that is within our wheelhouse. U.S. politics, yes. Fluffy kittens, no (usually).
• We do consider when something gets sideways traffic: Does this meet homepage standards, or will its audience find it on social?
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• We also consider overall traffic on an article. It’s fairly normal for a highly read piece to remain on the homepage for 24 hours but in different parts of the page throughout the day.
• We try to consider the mix of stories currently on the page. We aim for equal play between political parties and favor news over features — however, consumer interest stories (Does grilling meat cause cancer?) do well.
• Breaking news will always trump any plans we make for the day.
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A/B testing• The Post receives
real-time numbers when we use alternate feature images or text for the same article on the homepage.
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The same headline treatment is used throughout (Germany reduces Brazil to tears), but one image clearly outperforms the rest.
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Breaking-news alerts• The Post drives traffic to the homepage by quickly
sending e-mail alerts (about four times the number of subscribers receive our “national” alerts vs.“local” alerts) as well as mobile push alerts, which ping users with any version of the app — including Apple Watch.
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Thank you (Dziękuję)For more information: doris.truong@washpost.com
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