the key to huffington post's success

WHEN A BLOG BECAME A NEWSPAPERPART 3

Presented by: Aiste Slenyte Fátima Antelo Luz Parrondo

PART 1: INTRODUCTION

The Huffington Post - Breaking News and Opinion• An American news website and content aggregating blog; a sophisticated

system of aggregating content of its own and other sources• Founded on May 9, 2005 by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer, and Jonah

Peretti (left early on to work at BuzzFeed)• After the first year, Huff Post began to branch out into areas beyond

politics, as well as into media and entertainment • Its first local version - HuffPost Chicago in 2008• HuffPost New York in June, 2009• HuffPost Denver in September, 2009• HuffPost Los Angeles in December, 2009• Features various news sources and columnists • Uses social media devices/strategies

Key Factors of Success

• Careful Brand Management

Arianna Huffington: Big personalityOutsize public figureConnections, endless networking (adaptive to Web endeavors)

Liberal version of Drudge Report (to fill a news webpage gap as liberal media; comparisons)

Targeting people’s need to connect – blogging & community of comment (blogosphere w/ interesting voices)

Social Networking (recommendations, internet marketing)

• TechnologicalAdvantage

Kenneth Lerer:Idea to build a business around blogging community

Old media ways were not meeting people’s need to connect change of media landscape

Sophisticated system of aggregating content (breaking news, comments);low-cost content (opinion); links

Technology to get their work/site “out there in front of people”:Search optimization (SEO Strategies) &Headlining Content

“Triumph Of Packaging and Sensibility” (New York Times, Feb 2011)

• …turned out to be not just one thing, but a combination of features that together became a killer application “a mixture of advocacy and investigative in-your-face journalism”, Ken Lerer, 2009

• …built technology company as well as media company, the one that produced a profit in 2010!

5 yearsApprox. $50 million in costs

Connections

Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr. was an American broadcast journalist, best known as anchorman for the CBS Evening News for 19 years.

Ellen Degeneres, a stand-up comedienne, television host and actress.

Nora Ephron, an American film director, producer, screenwriter, novelist, journalist, author, and blogger. She was invited by Arianna Huffington to write about the experience in the Huffington Post and now regularly blogs for the site.

Current SituationOver 30 million visits a month

On February 7, 2011, AOL acquired The Huffington Post for $351 million making Arianna Huffington editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group

And last week (May 26, 2011):

PART 2: SEO STRATEGY

PART 3

PART 1

PART 2

Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O.)

Is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page

in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”)

search results.

Huff Po’sS.E.O. Strategy

1. Provide value

2. Use keywords – within reason

3. Catchy and descriptive headlines to get attention

4. Let readers share links on social media

5. Tag it!

6. Link, link, link

7. Picture it

8. Polling

Source: http://solutionmarketingblog.com/2011/02/17/huffpost-solution-marketing-seo/

Huff Po’sS.E.O. Strategy

PART 1

PART 3

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/02/11/business/11search_graphic.html?ref=media

1

23

4

65

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/02/11/business/11search_graphic.html?ref=media

7

Source: http://stateofthemedia.org/2011/overview-2/key-findings/

SEO in NUMBERS: We want to…

Capture

CTRTop Google Result

Be

Source: Search Engine Watch

+ ASPECTS:Impact upon driving traffic to news websites

Source: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/heather-dougherty/2009/04/online_news_aggregators_friend.html

Search Engine Market Share

PROBLEMS: Google

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/author/1970/Danny_Goodwin

PROBLEMS: Google

1. SEO won’t work forever

2. Search engines’ algorithm are getting better

3. Google’s own actions:

– alterating its algorithm, aiming a specific goal:

– to keep low-quality content from cluttering up

search results

PROBLEMS: Google

Week-to-week pattern of referrals

No sustained dropoff

Why it might be?

• 9,000 bloggers

• Blog’s Real Value?• Overstimating revenue that blogs’content generates in terms of

ad sales

• However, they bring value by influencing how much traffic

Google sends to the other parts of the site

• Key role ensuring SEO driven strategy doesn’t backfire

PROBLEMS: Bloggers

$105m. Demand

STRATEGY SWITCH

STRATEGY SWITCH

Loyal readers or followers

On social networking sites

SocialMedia

Optimization(SMO)

PART 3: SMO STRATEGY

PART 3

PART 2

PART 1

PART 3

Logging is one click ahead!

Use an existing user name and password to log in

OpenID + OAuth Authorization Model

Share your private resources stored on other site without having to reveal your user name and password

Top 10Social Networks

Source: Hitwise.com (visited 30/05/2011)http://www.hitwise.com/us/datacenter/main/dashboard-10133.html

Brings together the opinions of large interconnected communities

Supports filtering of large quantities of data

Social Recommender Systems

Recommendation Approaches

• Content-based Filtering Keywords in article User’s taste

• Collaborative FilteringOther’s liking pattern User’s liking pattern

• Hybrid methods

Recommendation Systems

• Create value-added relationship between the site and the customer

• Sites invest in learning about their users • Custom interfaces that match customer needs • Improve loyalty • Improve trust

Social Recommender Systems

Social Media + Recommender Systems:

• Social media introduces new types of public data and metadata:

tags, ratings, comments, and explicit people relationships

• Recommender Systems help to alleviate information overload by presenting the most attractive and relevant content

• Entity Recommendation– Content recommendation– Tag recommendation– People recommendation– Community recommendation

• Target audience– Recommendations for individuals– Recommendations for Groups or communities– Recommendations for everyone

Recommendation Techniques (social media)

WHY 300 Million?

A different concept of NEWS

A Social Newspaper:• Each reader has its own account • You can have friends and check their activities • You can keep track of your friends and followers

comments• You get badges depending on your level of activity

inside the network

What are HuffPost Badges?

To empower HuffPost readers and usersthey focus on three key areas:

– Connecting with others

– Engaging with our content

– Moderating our comments

•They relied on user’s collaboration (Wikipedia)•To ensure good content, they also hired their own staff

A GREAT BALANCE to get news updated on regular basis

WHEN A BLOG BECAME A NEWSPAPER

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION!!

Presented by:

Aiste Slenyte

Fátima Antelo

Luz Parrondo