Online Journalism News

'Content isn't always king': using connections to drive media site traffic

'Content isn't always king,' said Current TV's head of communities, Richard Cole, at an AOP conference which looked at 'developing communities around content' .

"Content will drive people to your site, but the connections they make within that site is what will drive them [to your website] regularly, without you having to generate the content to keep them coming back," he told delegates at the London event.

The site, which was founded by Al Gore in 2004 and pays for video content of which some ends up on the television channel, uses recognition and reciprocation in simple formats to encourage user participation, Cole explained.

You need to 'push the ego-drivers', he said, adding that it's 'not always about providing swag'.

Current TV, a 'content-driven business', has found rewarding users with a ranking badge for their site or profile is more successful than sending out T-shirts, he explained.

Editors work to 'shape' user-generated content by contacting users to suggest a new title, and a new picture, for example.

"It's a good position to be in, to sort through some good content," he told Journalism.co.uk afterwards.

He also added that return visitors could be seen as engaged users, even if they weren't actively creating content and counted as part of the site's metrics for user-generated content.

While Cole said online users fitted into the 90-9-1 theory - audience (90 per cent), editors (9 per cent) and creators (1 per cent) - fellow speaker Steve Semelsberger, senior VP of Global Sales&Business Development at Pluck Corporation, disagreed.

Users who create content account for around 0.1 per cent, Semelsberger said. The vast majority are lurkers, he added.

Semelsberger told the audience how one of the company's clients, USAToday, has 'seen some really nice results' from its online communities with 235,000 new user registrations and a 9 per cent increase in unique users between March 2007 and March 2008.

He defended the microsite model, giving examples of how they could become 'core integrated sponsored vehicles', such as the Wall Street Journal's Retirement Debate site, which is sponsored by Allstate.

Tags (click tag to find related articles; click icon for feed):
events | aop | pluck | current tv | online journalism | richard cole | steve semelsberger |

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