Search Traffic for Publishers: Audience, Article, and Revenue Impacts

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Search Traffic for Publishers: Audience, Article, and Revenue Impacts | Online

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Past Locations for this Event

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Join us for a discussion on how successful news organizations, magazines, trade publications, and other digital publishers are building their audience, impact, and bottom-line with search traffic.

In 2017 Google reclaimed its position from Facebook as the top referrer of traffic to publishers. Search remains the single biggest opportunity for new audience growth for most publications. And not just audience growth; serving the specific information needs of searchers has opened up new opportunities for publishers to drive revenue and impact...

  • Wirecutter generated $150 million in affiliate sales revenue from its launch in 2011 to its sale to the New York Times in 2016. By creating product reviews in a format that better matches and served consumers' "best [product-in-category]"-style search queries, they've built on a model pioneered by Cambridge-based Reviewed and others that's both profitable and authoritative.

  • Vox's "explainers" -- longform, context-driven pieces focused on answering common questions about the background or process of a topic or news event, rather than providing the latest updates -- have helped Vox scale to 33 million monthly visitors, in large part through search traffic by providing content that matches the "why-" and "how-" intent of searchers' queries.

  • The Texas Tribune from launch has made providing SEO-friendly databases of public records a core part of its journalism, giving their readers easier access to information their reporters were already painstakingly compiling for stories and acquiring through FOIA requests. A 2014 Nieman Lab profile of The Texas Tribune notes the success of these databases in bringing search traffic to the site, "pulling in three times the pageviews as the site’s stories were."

Join us for more examples and perspectives from both local and national top-tier publishers that are getting Google to bring the audiences they want to the content their teams work so hard on.

We're building a community for publishers, media business professionals, and media entrepreneurs in Boston.

Audience Leaders organizes events to spread knowledge of the models modern media companies are using to succeed, to connect you with your peers and other business-side media professionals in Boston, and to build a stronger Boston by supporting the companies that give Boston's creators, innovators, and changemakers the reach they deserve. You can learn more about our mission here, and join the Audience Leaders community to get access to events, resources, and more.

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