I once headed up content marketing for a small online publisher. It's a horrible job. You spend half your day trying to come up with clever headlines of an article you've at-best skimmed and the other half trying to game traffic sources like reddit or fark or harassing other sites for a back-link. Content is too cheap. Supply is enormous (huf po alone does 1000 posts a day!). So, it's a race to the bottom with everyone producing crap. It'll eventually get so bad that a larger market will open up for for-pay content like the nytimes where you're guaranteed some level of quality. I think the traditional pubs who can weather the storm will do just fine once we reach this point.
It's rather unfair to use "number of comments" as a metric to compare between sites. HuffPo has a culture of commenting and community while WSJ does not.
<i>After all, at the height of the Fourth Estate’s power, the population was better informed than today’s Facebook cherry-pickers.</i><p>I want to take issue with that statement. I see it repeated in many places, but usually it has either anecdotal evidence, or, in this case, no evidence to back it up. Was the population better informed when traditional newspapers were at their peak (let's say from 1900 to 1960)? How would you measure such an ambiguous term like "informed"? I think there's a lot of unanswered questions about the "informedness" of the average person, and it's not at all clear that the average person was more informed, in any sense, during the height of newspaper dominance than they are today.<p>Let's also not forget that newspapers were often just as "bad" (in terms of publishing trivial stories or publishing biased stories) as the Huffington Post is today. You just need to look at the history of "yellow journalism" to see it.
<i>Who is right? Who can look to the better future in the digital world ? Is it the virtuous author carving language-smart headlines or the aggregator generating eye-gobbling phrases thanks to high tech tools? Your guess. Maybe it’s time to wake-up.</i><p>I suspect most of this is related to the pride of journalists have in delivering a solid product. Questioning this is similar to asking why not all news stations follow the example of FOX or MSNBC, because hey, they are successful. Or why Woody Allen is making the same old boring movies, and that he should instead switch over into producing reality formats as they are are much cheaper to produce and probable getting at least similar viewer ratings. I personally have to say that I dislike the rewriting practice, but then again it has been always a core component of journalism.
There is something to be said about not giving too much control to the algorithms when it comes to the news. HuffPo is loud, obnoxious, and frankly it aggregates a lot of garbage. I'm glad we still have news sources like the NYTimes, BBC, and WaPo that are more curated and subdued and not quite so optimized for ads and SEO.<p><i>Like no one else, the HuffPo masters eye-grabbing headline such as these :
Watch Out Swimmers: Testicle-Eating Fish Species Caught in US Lake (4,000 Facebook recommendations), or: Akron Restaurant Owner Dies After Serving Breakfast To Obama (3300 comments) or yesterday’s home:LEPAGE LOSES IT: IRS ‘THE NEW GESTAPO’ displayed in a 80 points font-size</i><p>IMO, this is not something to be proud of.<p>HuffPo is a great money making site and a great entertainment site. It is a terrible news site.
The other sites are also behind a pay wall and have a different monetization strategy so looking at comment counts may not be the best comparison. That's not to say that HuffPo's titles are not eye-catching but it may explain a bit of the differences in the number of comments.
I don't know if that title's catchy enough. Here, I summarized the article in 300 words and rewrapped it for you:<p>Inside Huffington Post’s traffic machine: the algorithm that’s killing traditional media
<a href="http://benwerd.com/blog/2012/07/09/inside-huffington-posts-traffic-machine-the-algorithm-thats-killing-traditional-media/" rel="nofollow">http://benwerd.com/blog/2012/07/09/inside-huffington-posts-t...</a>
Does anyone know where they pull there SEO data? Are all the sites doing this sort of thing using their own bespoke SEO algorithms or are there third party API solutions for this market? If not, that could be a valuable service.