USAToday’s Social Network Experiment May Not Be Paying Off
Michael Arrington
46 comments »
When USAToday relaunched its site in March as a social network around news, I and others thought it was big news.
They integrated Pluck’s new Social Media Suite, a group of social networking products that a number of high profile news sites have adopted. Overnight, USAToday went from being an old school news site to something much different. Readers could now create profiles, comment on articles, vote to recommend articles to others (very Digg-like), etc.
On Pluck’s Social Media Suite product page, the number one selling point to publishers is “Drive site traffic and increase page views.” Given the insane ability of social networks to drive traffic, this seems like a fairly safe promise to make. But so far, the data we have says it hasn’t paid off in terms of unique visitors or page views for USAToday.
Here’s the Compete.com data, showing monthly visitors down from 14 million in March to about 10 million today, a 29% drop in unique visitors. I added in the New York Times and Washington Post for comparison purposes - both are at about even levels with March.
Comscore also shows a decline, although a smaller one. March unique visitors were 7.3 million; June was 6.3 million - a 14% drop. Total pageviews were 70 million in March v. 59 million in June - a 16% drop.
Neither Comscore or Compete are perfect, but the trend seems to suggest the relaunch isn’t performing well. At the very least unique visitors and page views aren’t spiking upwards, perhaps as USA Today and Pluck anticipated. There is no doubt that the Pluck products are very solid products, but perhaps news and social networking just don’t mix.
Update: USAToday issues a press release saying traffic is, actually, way up.
When I did the video review of the launch, I thought that the voting probably wouldn’t take off. I think one reason for the decline is the overwhelming numbers of newspaper web sites today. So many have relaunched with social features and “my” pages that people might just be sticking with their local paper.
I can’t picture my mom voting on a story on usa today.
Must not have worked. They should scrap it because compete.com says their traffic hasn’t spiked. Maybe this is an indication you should turn off comments and other “social network” features on techcrunch.
Wow, Compete.com says traffic is going down so it must be true. I mean they are never wrong or anything. Isn’t that the same site that said YouTube had surpassed Google.com? Tell me when you have some real information.
USA Today is probably under more pressure from the larger online news providers like Yahoo, Google, CNN, etc. due to the fact that national and international news are much more commoditized. Local newspapers, on the other hand, have documented growth which is likely due to their local news mixed into their national and international coverage. USA Today has no local news.
Tough problem to solve in digital age.
Traditional media companies, for the most part, walk blindly into the abyss. They have a long history of copycatting and as you will find, many dozens of newspapers have followed USA Today down the same feeble road. Comments on articles, rating of articles, generic blogs, generic forums. What’s the point?
On Tech Crunch, it makes sense. It’s a clearly defined community with an audience that comes for a reason. It is not mass media.
My comments on USA Today are meaningless. They add nothing, are seen by very few people, and don’t produce any movement in the earth’s gravitational shift. People want to participate because it makes a difference. If that is not the case, well then who really cares. It’s a novelty that soon wears off.
Traditional media needs to understand that their value is in their brand and their core business. They are around and they are proud because they feel that their work makes a difference. When they figure out how to transfer that type of pride of ownership to their audience, well then you will see significant applications and interaction. When the audience sees that their participation with someone like the USA Today is actually powerful, traffic will grow steadily. Ever heard of moveon.org? The mantra there is ‘participate and maybe you make a difference’.
Traditional media companies, for the most part, walk blindly into the abyss. They have a long history of copycatting and as you will find, many dozens of newspapers have followed USA Today down the same feeble road. Comments on articles, rating of articles, generic blogs, generic forums. What’s the point?
On Tech Crunch, it makes sense. It’s a clearly defined community with an audience that comes for a reason. It is not mass media.
My comments on USA Today are meaningless. They add nothing, are seen by very few people, and don’t produce any movement in the earth’s gravitational shift. People want to participate because it makes a difference. If that is not the case, well then who really cares. It’s a novelty that soon wears off.
Traditional media needs to understand that their value is in their brand and their core business. They are around and they are proud because they feel that their work makes a difference. When they figure out how to transfer that type of pride of ownership to their audience, then you will see significant applications and interaction. When the audience sees that their participation with someone like the USA Today is actually powerful, traffic will grow steadily. Ever heard of moveon.org? The mantra there is ‘participate and maybe you make a difference’.
I guess Kent wanted to REALLY make sure his voice was heard so he posted it twice?
I agree though. Same reason when I see a TechFacebookCrunch story on this website and it has 145 comments, I usually don’t even bother. But a story that has maybe 25 or so comments, that’s something I’m more apt to participate in.
The main question never asked about initiatives of this sort is what’s the motivation for people to be so (demandingly) involved with it…
It’s pretty easy to see why certain kinds of people get involved in Newsvine, or Facebook, or Digg, or even NewsTrust (a real niche social news community)…
The goofy belief about “people” just *dying* for community and on wanting to comment on the news really doesn’t cut it. The People got lots of places to do that kind of thing–and where it may just be more fun.
Having worked on some “crowdsourced” journalism project, I found out a lot about what motivates people to want to be involved with news beyond just reading it and commenting for their own benefit (which in some way is what USA Today is asking.) After awhile, that’s like the sound of one hand clapping. So, did USA Today do anything to motivate people to be involved? Did they reach out to people after they were involved, or did they simply sit back expect The People to “talk among yourselves”? Big media may need to re-think its own particular kind of passive role as Provider of the Platform if it wants to keep people interested and coming back.
I don’t think that this is a matter of a “social network” problem as it is a content problem. I have a subscription to USAToday and since the beginning of the year have been less and less satisfied with the content. The business section stinks and they have maybe 1-2 technology articles a week where you get the geeks to comment. My local paper has better sections for both and double the quantity of articles on a daily basis.
If their content improves, their results will improve it is as simple as that.
Pluck is a solid product? Says who? If it claims to drive traffic, but doesn’t, why is it a solid product? What are the numbers for all the other sites? Has pluck driven increases to other sites? Unless that is the case, looks like newspaper companies, faced with thousands of bloggers calling them “old media” and dinosaurs, got pushed into something that really had no market.
I don’t think the problem here is the addition of the tools, I think it is the way it was done. I am not a fan of the new design/user experience. I would like to see a comparison between this site and cnn.com. I really like the design of the latter. Sure it could be more cutting edge but I think it is a great example of clean and simple that reaches the audience. Not sure that USA Today does that.
Mike,
If you have comscore or hitwise numbers…why in the heck would you bring compete.com into your story (outside the fact that compete.com advertises here). This is a tech crowd - and everyone who reads this blog understands that compete.com data is no more reliable than alexa.com data.
It seems to me that you have some sort of agenda - bashing alexa one day and then quoting compete numbers (as if reliable - when you know they are not) the next.
USAToday did the right thing. There is not much increase in traffic due to increased competition. Even CNN changed their layout a short while ago. Personally, I would go to Google News, Digg and Netscape for more interesting news. Variety is what I like.
The March to June comparison is fairly meaningless, particularly in news segment, where traffic is driven by news events. Big stories in March versus a slow news month in June would easily mask smaller trends. Hurricane Katrina, to name a somewhat recent example, probably created traffic records at many news sites that haven’t yet been broken.
Use a more reliable source - certainly comscore over compete - and do a six month rolling average if you really want to isolate the trend.
I like the fact that USAToday has the ability to leave comments. This way the people can “fix” stories that have an obvious bias. As far as voting, rating, and user profiles those are useless in this type of site - who has the time or the motivation to use these features on a site like USAToday?
I think this was a valiant effort to provide a more interactive user experience to a website whose users have no interest in it.
Kind of like adding stories on Linux to AOL. Nice thought but nobody cares. But kudos for the effort — short of conducting user polls (interactive in themselves) I don’t think many people would have foreseen an issue in adding this interactivity.
Well, with comments like this, that is no surprise:
http://www.usatoday.com/weathe.....PageReturn
We all have to remember that there is an important element to how you build your website, and that is your customer!
Some audiences are not going to care about added social networking functionality. This is important to remember. Just jumping on the bandwagon, however exciting it may seem, does not mean your customer base will appreciate it.
This point is made pretty clearly with USAToday.
Tim McCormack
iRent2u.com - The Online Rental Marketplace
No business can expect a “network” of flesh and blood people to gel, if there is no concrete value to them. There needs to be a lot more thought into the strategy behind the network. In this instance, the user doesn’t get any extra value in signing up, other than being able to post messages to random strangers.
The power of many only applies when the many have something in common.
It’s not a question of whether social networks can work for mass media. The question is… what can the media offer that will make a user WANT to be a part of that community?
Great point Shelli!
I’d be interested to see what awareness they tried to generate for the new features. Also agree with the statements made about what value is the new social features adding. Also, community takes time to build and there needs to be some affinity for people to join in and want to be involved. Other than “news” what affinity do people have to USA Today? Perhaps if there was a newsworthy event or issue around a story that might draw people in, that would help.
I think the problem lies in SEO problems more then anything else.
Interestingly, this week Red Herring just did the same transition from one way media outlet to social networking media site and I think it’ll see similar results (I’m going on the premise that compete is at least somewhat accurate here). It’s just a hassle for me to create another profile. The NY Times lets you digg, facebook, and newsvine any story already, and that’s the way to go for mass media. I agree with Kent (despite the double comment) and with MrktMind. Commenting is a must have, but that’s all I can be troubled to do.
The site’s design conflicts heavily with the print version of the paper - where the print version is simple to scan and uses bright, happy colors, the online version is busy, choppy and without a unifying color scheme.
It’s not clear that people want single-source news commented and re-arranged by their fellow readers. Social editing may make more sense when people combine various sources on a focused topic.
And that honking Chrysler ad covered half my screen when I checked out USA Today. That has to cost a few readers.
@24 paul - great observation. One of my big complaints when USA Today relaunched was that the site had such obnoxious advertising that the community features didn’t matter. I was loathe to go there when it took me three clicks to get past ads to read a story.
Fundamentally, the “talk amongst yourselves” community won’t work unless there is a community to begin with. It just devolves into personal attacks, political fanaticism and spam.
When I was in college, I launched The Daily Northwestern online. (This was back before most people in college had email addresses.) I was responsible for the paper’s email address. Some prankster signed us up for a mailing list on bagpipes. That mailing list generated hundreds of emails a day back in the early 90s. Why? Because if you want to talk about bagpipes there’s a limited set of places you can go.
Look at the real world. Is there a New York City community? Aside from the days immediately after 9/11, I’d say no. The city is made up of lots of little communities. Something at NYC scale is just too big to be a community. The same goes for USA Today. It’s just too big and general.
There’s also the feeling of being talked at with sites like USA Today. The communities that I’m most likely to participate in are communities where there’s a dialog.
Know thy audience!
Who reads USA Today? What’s their core demographic? Is this demo interested in–and actively participating in–2.0 Land?
Now I don’t have those figures, but I can probably safely hazard a guess that the answer to the 2.0 question is “No.”
If you’re going to get 2.0-ish, then do so a little at a time and test-adapt-test-adapt-test.
But for God’s sake, don’t go for a drastic overnight makeover and total shift of focus. Any audience is likely to not accept such drastic .com makovers that miscalculate their basic values. Look at what happened to Netscape.com after their overnight Digg-over. *CRASH!!* And now, we hear there may not even BE a Netscape.com for much longer… If Netscape readers were looking for a Digg experience, they would have been using Digg, or any number of the other Digg-ish niche-sites out there.
What makes sites like USA Today useful for their users are the same things that make them stand out from the rest. Exclusive content, etc. Are these strengths always best served by a social-network-in-a-box approach?
Us Geeks, who browse and participate in 2.0 Land tend to forget that not every site is a perfect fit for 2.0-ness. We complain…a lot (heck, when do we ever NOT have something to bitch about)? But we also tend to be a little self-centered, and look at a lot of sites with the blinders on. What works well for TC et al., may not be a hit with all audiences of all sites.
Ya, intrusive ads totally drive users away. WTF were they thinking by running that Chrysler ad??? I’ll probably never go back there with crap like that getting forced onto my screen.
Talk about selling out.
The 30 Sheckles they got for that ad cost them how many readers?
Biker Dan is the first to really get to he heart of the matter. So far nobody else has seized upon the bigger picture here.
Content is important, but context is king. What is the context of USAToday’s coverage, shallow dives across a broad spectrum of topics for the entire USA. Their brand has always been about this and people know it. Worse still, they are always trying to make everyone happy, which ultimately makes a lot of it very mediocre and less appealing - a downward spiral really. With the increasing “nicheification” made possible in digital media (and evidenced by the need for all the different Crunch brands), what is the context for passion, attention and interaction within a USA Today?
This is not a failure of the Social Network + Traditional Media model, it is a failure of USA Today to be aggressive enough with rethinking their brand and innovating to serve the needs of their core audience.
Yes, they did not consider the impact of the radical redesign on their existing audience - Yes, their core audience is mostly part of the 90% from the 1/9/90 rule - Yes, they have alienated a portion of that audience and are losing SOA with them (Share of Attention)
So what are they doing to encourage participation from those who are there? How are the identifying and supporting the contributors? How are they themselves joining the conversation?
Was rewriting the comment above after losing it on my mobile phone this morning… forgot an important point.
The other major trend for context setting is the trend to hyperlocal. Gannett is doing a great job with this in many markets (see the latest Wired article on Gannett) and I expect that much of that will ultimately bubble up. In short, they should not let go of this experiment unless they want to return to the core brand value they established over the last several years.
Knowing what Neuharth has stood for over the years, I expect he will push them to continue their path towards innovation and adjust to the markets response to make their offering stronger. However, I don’t think he is really in charge of day to day anymore, so who knows how it will play out.
I wouldn’t pick up a print version of USA Today, much less read it online. A social networking function? Yawn.
As a previous poster suggested, tech savvy local papers are both more relevant to the readers, which drive participation and the blogs by columnists get responded to. You can have an actual conversation with them without having to write a lette to the editor to get heard.
@Dave - Alexa said YouTube has surpassed Google.com. You may want to get your facts straight.
maybe the USAToday crowed were never interested in a social network…they just want the news. inturn, that added feature - unwanted feature, disgruntled them - so they left for another news site
I wonder how many of the features actually count as PV’s according to ComScore or Compete.com, and if time spent on the site went up at all? It still doesn’t match up with Pluck’s promise to “Drive site traffic and increase page views” but it would be interesting to know that data point to see if they need to revisit their mission statement.
http://www.marketwatch.com/new.....&symb=
@31 - I know. That is one of a gazillion problems at alexa - I am just saying that compete also has a gazillion problems and should not be used as a factual reference. Both are terrible. I guess the question would be: Which one stinks less? Answer: It doesnt matter, they both stink.
And…I am not sure why I care enough to waste 25 seconds typing this.
It might also suggest people are following stories more intently. People only have so much time - they can either read a lot of stories or they can read a couple and follow the comments.
What does USAToday’s own statistics say. Are numbers of comments going up or down? Is voting going up or down? I mean really 1/3 of their visitors just stopped visiting since January? (15M to 10M). Seems like the data is screwy to me.
Either the data is getting more accurate or it’s getting less accurate I don’t think this is any indication of the success / failure of their social experiement.
I agree that you really need to know your audience and take the time to implement features within the Social Networking platform that grab the attention of your core audience. Here is a link to the latest Compete.com data for Mashable. It shows that the Converdge Social Networking platform they integrated into their site seems to be paying off nicely.
I find several of the comments here fascinating in there conservativeness. Some comments claim that USAToday.com made execution mistakes, but others here seem to explicitly state that a mainstream news site trying to pull this off will fail because the audience does not want it. With that attitude, it sounds like a few people here would make perfect big media executives!
The key to making it big these days for news site seems to be built into the fact that the future of the web is social media followed by the web OS. Bravo for USAToday’s actions, but I feel as though the social bookmarking phase will level off towards a more social experience online. I wish I knew what that new application will be, what about large wikis with social bookmarking/ratings built in?
Having joined the USA Today network to make comments, I feel the issue with it is that it gives you more capability than community.
I can start my own blog and make comments on stories. Why would I start a blog there when I already have my own? Where’s the community?
I’d recommend people compare Pluck to Facebook before they take USA Today to task…Gannett’s trying to stay relevant. And if they say traffic is up, it’s not hurting them to try. At least they’re trying!
Disclaimer: I’m in client-side marketing.
It seems to me that USA Today is facing 2 problems, both related to the usability of its Web site.
1 - People don’t come to USA Today to “hang out”, like they do on social network sites like Facebook for example.
2 - People come to USA Today (and other news sites) to read the news. Get in. Get out. Get on w/life.
So… the social framework they’ve created doesn’t get “used”. People come, and depend on USA Today to tell them the news. Then they go. Unless you’re a news junky - and are up on current events - you don’t care about commenting on news stories or telling complete strangers which stories you think are your “favorites”. You can’t find out if your “Friends” are hanging out on the site in real time, etc.
Since the Facebook’s of the world have seemingly cornered the market on the social networking side of things, it seems to me that strategically, it would make more sense for USA Today to concentrate on getting really good at posting news - more quickly than competitors, more in-depth and investigative information, and/or concentrate on detailed coverage of special topics.