Just like user needs, pageviews are not a goal themselves, but a means to reach a goal.
By Guest Contributor: Lars K Jensen, Audience Development Lead in Berlingske Media
The media industry has a history of chasing hyped-up terms in its own way, sometimes manipulating the trend du jour to fit the existing narrative. Right now, almost every publisher is talking about user needs—which is an excellent approach. However, we must be careful not to mess it up.
First coined back in 2018 by Dmitry Shishkin, then the digital development editor at the BBC World Service, user needs have taken the world of digital media and publishing by storm in recent years. In short, it’s about applying tags or descriptions to your stories based on what they do for your audience (and not what kind of content it is or the section it belongs to, as we are used to doing).
For instance, it could be “Update me” for news stories, “Help me understand” for analysis, or “Give me an edge” for stories that may help your audience solve a problem.
Incubation
Since 2021, I have been analyzing, sharing insights and recommendations, and facilitating change across multiple newsrooms and publishers—from larger legacy publishers to smaller startups finding their footing in the industry—as a consultant using the user needs approach. I have primarily been using The Wall Street Journal’s model (a refined iteration of the original needs from the BBC), and since the summer of 2022, I have applied it at Berlingske Media, where I currently work.
We publish four titles: Berlingske and Weekendavisen, which are primarily subscription-funded and also published in print, and B.T. and Euroinvestor, which are 100 percent digital with no subscription, only a registration wall for some articles. Berlingske is the title I have been working with the longest, so they are more advanced in applying user needs. However, all publishers (and, I would argue, anyone communicating to an audience) can benefit from working with user needs. For user needs to be effective and lead to meaningful outcomes, you must be aware of potential pitfalls. As with many other methodologies, using the associated measurements and data correctly is essential.
As digital publishers, we have a seemingly endless number of data points to analyze and target. Despite both maturation and sophistication in how we handle data, the pageviews metric still plays a significant role in the industry and many newsrooms. When working with user needs, however, pageviews aren’t particularly useful—unless we aim to measure the effectiveness of user needs on the front page, social media, newsletters, or other traffic sources.
A means to an end
Pageviews are an expression of how well an article was marketed. A publisher’s digital front page is, at the end of the day, a marketing tool for stories and other offerings, “selling” them to the audience—not a measure of how they were consumed. Instead, you need to focus on actual consumption and recognize that pageviews are a means to drive that consumption, not a goal itself. Actual consumption is measured by what users do once they land on a story, whether it’s presented as text, audio, video, or another format. These signals indicate that users are genuinely engaging with the story. For subscription-funded publishers with paywalls or registration walls, tracking conversions is essential.
However, not all publishers use such walls, or they might only apply to specific content. Solely focusing on conversions makes it challenging to analyze and apply the user needs framework for publishers offering free content—such as B.T. in our case. An important lesson: Stories can create significant value and be almost indispensable to the audience, even if people aren’t willing to pay for them. It’s also possible for a story or user need to perform well in converting free readers to registered users while failing to be consumed satisfactorily. In that scenario, what would you do—improve the content or focus on optimizing its performance?
This is why it’s crucial to go beyond conversions as well. I recommend focusing on what I call “the softer conversions,” which all publishers encounter daily: when users decide to start consuming the content presented to them. Whether you’re publishing articles, audio, or video (or all three), there are metrics to guide you. For audio and video, track starts and completion rates (measured as a percentage), and for text, use signals such as scroll depth and time spent with the article.
Autosuggestion
As every publisher working with user needs has learned, you need to tag your stories. This can be done manually or automatically—though I recommend manual tagging if you’re just getting started and curious. I even wrote a defense for manual user needs tagging. Manual tagging is hard work, but the insights you gain are invaluable, and you’ll likely move faster and create actual impact sooner. Automated tagging, on the other hand, is incredibly fast (assuming you can trust the algorithm, its training data, and are okay with the risk of black-box issues). Whichever route you choose, I recommend putting some thought into how you decide which user need(s) to apply to a given story. At Berlingske Media, we mostly focus on the beginning of the article (title/headline, subtitle, image, first paragraphs of the body text) since we’re concentrating on conversions.
An example: If an article is labeled as a “Connect me” story in the title and subtitle but turns out to be a “Help me understand” story, how do you tag it? It’s a “Help me understand” story, but you presented it to the audience as a “Connect me” story—so most users digging into it will probably expect that. As I mentioned, at Berlingske Media, we label articles based on how they’re presented, staying true to our approach of focusing on conversions. Obviously, user needs presented later in the article are factors in keeping the user engaged (whether reading, watching, listening, etc.). It would be interesting to explore which user needs are present throughout a story and how they affect its consumption.
Currently, we don’t have these more fine-grained insights, but it would be valuable to learn. In this case, I’d probably look to automation—with plenty of random samples along the way. 😉 What we do have, however, is a pretty good understanding of which stories our audience actually wants to consume—and why. We’re constantly tracking signals like scroll depth and time spent, and we have data reporting tools that combine these metrics, making it easier to identify which stories our audience (and, for two of our publishers, subscribers) want to engage with—and which they don’t.
Logically, pageviews are part of the equation, but they can never be the only metric you rely on.
Heart and Soul
No matter how you label user needs, it’s essential to move beyond pageviews and focus instead on your users’ desire and need to engage with a given story. This is the heart and soul of working with user needs in both audience engagement and journalism. Focusing on user needs will provide better insights and lead to more valuable knowledge and recommendations when it’s time to implement actual changes in the newsroom—where the real hard work begins. As an industry, we have largely moved past the pageviews discussion. Let’s not revive it in our quest to understand what creates true value for our audiences.
Insights
Here are a few recommendations:
- Start by clarifying what you want to achieve with user needs and whether you plan to use an existing model or design your own.
- Determine how you will label your content—manually, automatically, or both.
- Define the metrics that best align with your goals to enable meaningful conversations.
- Ensure you can access reliable metrics and KPIs—and verify their accuracy.
- When analyzing user needs, always remember that the insights should be practical and actionable within an editorial environment like a newsroom. I call this “analysis activation”.
Lars K Jensen is the Audience Development Lead at Berlingske Media in Copenhagen. He has a background in journalism and has more than 15 years of experience working with newsrooms from both digital development and audience and insights perspectives.
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