At the same time, what we do create with products is quality in and of itself, and we’re incredibly explicit about what’s sponsored. There’s a company that we work with called Zestra, for female arousal. They’re approach, which is interesting, is to use content as a means to get their brand out there and to engage potential customers in a conversation. They’re doing that through our site, but they’re also doing it through PR and their site as well. What was interesting for us with this client was they have a lot of research around female arousal and intimacy, so it’s not that they’re just over here saying, “Buy this product, it’s the best product ever.” Instead, they’re over here saying, “Hey, we understand the various issues surrounding women and sexuality, and we want to give you content and create a way to be more informed.” It ends up being a little bit of a softer sell. This is a real issue for our users, and the great thing is, when we partner with a company like that, that actually has research—they also have experts etc.—it ends up being truly beneficial. Nobody seems to be bothered by the fact that it’s sponsored because it’s frankly related content.
I guess also readers are starting to get used to more things like that. As you said, a lot of other websites are doing the same thing, it’s becoming part of the reading experience at this point.
Definitely. I think that’s the case, although there are certainly different ways that various media companies approach that. We’ve all seen examples where it’s really heavy-handed and you feel like it’s not so much for the reader but it’s the advertiser pushing their own message. It’s a lot like social media—you really have to be so mindful of your audience. If you just are over there pushing your agenda, people are going to tune out. You have to figure out where that balance is.
Could you tell us a little bit about the YourTango community and the way people can earn points. It’s an interesting and different way to engage readers more and improve loyalty.
We just launched with a company called Badgeville, only two weeks ago. We’ve identified around ten ways for people to earn points. They range from points for signing up to our newsletters, to reading articles, to posting questions or answering questions, contributing to the blogs, etc. We also launched with Zestra, and we’re doing a contest with them where people can get the “Z badge” if they participate in the contest, to win a trip to New York that Zestra is sponsoring. So those are the kinds of things we’re offering incentives for. And it varies: you get more points for signing up for a newsletter than for reading an article.
Has it been successful so far?
It’s really early. I couldn’t say how much more it’s improving engagement or any of that stuff. Anecdotally, looking at this unit we have on every page showing who’s participating and who’s getting points—which at first was dominated by our team—now we’re seeing all these names that we’ve never seen before. It seems like it’s starting to be taken up by our audience. The ultimate goal for us is to use it as a fun way to engage users and to help them feel rewarded by what they’re doing, and incentivized to come back and to continue to do that. We have identified a handful of “super users” through their contributions to our blogs, and commenting, and things like that, and we just felt like these are people who care and they’re spending a lot of time, so why not give them status, and help them feel like they can get credibility that they have earned by being so active? We’re pretty optimistic.
The other part of it is just the pure, fun, gaming part of it. That’s been part of the fun for me in using Foursquare—you want to unlock this badge and that badge. There is something to be said about just the fun of it.
Yes, sites like YourTango are becoming more common on the internet, and as a reader, I do not feel obliged to "get used to it". Of course they will not get complaints, because most people won’t waste their time and will move on to other sources. A few curmudgeons like myself will post a comment like this: complaining, but on a different site entirely.
High-quality branded content? I just finished reading some articles on YourTango, and "high-quality" was not what I'd use to describe them. Miller's statement about "...a gap in the market that we could really exploit" says it all -- YourTango is just another advertising site that puts quasi-journalism to work as marketing's whore.
It's obvious from the material I read on YourTango and the statements by Miller in this article that the readership are regarded as little more than stupid sheep to keep corralled for fleecing. Seriously, earning points to win badges? And the sad part is, Miller is right. There are people who get sucked into winning some sort of electronic status, as if it were something with a valuable and tangible existence offline. However, the down side is that quantity is routinely rewarded over quality in those schemes, and quality goes down as users post garbage to raise their numbers and status. Actually, the badge scheme could explain the lousy articles I just read at YourTango, roughly six months now since this article was written. I’ve seen ratings systems put in place on some sites along with similar status schemes, but high ratings invariably go to articles, posts and comments the user agrees with, not those that are informative, well-written, and take care to minimize bias.
If we’re lucky, advertising sites like YourTango will continue to the downward slide into low quality and evolve themselves out of existence. I’m afraid the more likely scenario is that users will live down to advertisers’ low expectations of their audience, and instead of a once venerable institution in its own right, journalism will become just another technique in marketing’s bag of tricks.
#1 Posted by TR, CJR on Fri 25 Nov 2011 at 09:19 PM