Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Steve Hind: When readers are lured in and rewarded for their curiosity with good content, everyone wins. Sites like Buzzfeed use this to their advantage, and traditional media should take note..

.Last week the internet was treated to another great offering from Randall Munroe, author of the xkcd cartoon blog.

In it, Munroe re-imagined 20th century headlines if they were written to get more clicks. "This one weird mould kills all germs" could have applied to the discovery of penicillin in 1928. "You won't believe what these people did to the Berlin Wall" could have appeared in November 1989 for maximum effect.

His point, of course, was that the "clickbait-ification" of our news is cheapening it....

Winning in digital media now boils down to a simple equation: figure out a way to produce the most content at as low a cost as possible.

In recent years, new players like The Huffington Post burst onto the scene by pumping out a dizzying amount of content each day. The company has 532 full-time editorial staff producing about 1,200 pieces of content per day (and that’s not including the 28 full-time blog editors who oversee the 400 pieces of content per day coming from its blog). All this content generates 43 million pageviews per day, per Comscore. The pageview race now stretches far beyond HuffPost, as many publishers combat low ad prices with high volume.

Even old publications, like Forbes, are taking part in the pageview race. It has 50 on its editorial team. However, it also has about 1,000 contributors. Between the two, Forbes puts up about 400 posts per day and sees 4 million pageviews per day, per Comscore. The company doesn’t separate out how much the staff and contributors put out. But last year, the company posted its best financials since the 2008 industry collapse and saw digital ad revenue spike 19 percent year-over-year. Quantity pays the bills....