Slate has gone all-in on loyalty to lower their dependence on platforms, like Facebook, and monetize their incredibly loyal audience. Get an inside look at their strategy.

1. Monetizing Loyal Audiences,
the Slate Way

2. @kelseylarendt
Senior Customer Success Manager
at Parse.ly
Head of Parse.ly Professional Services
Kelsey Arendt

3. How do you monetize audience loyalty?

4. “Rather than treating their readers and viewers as a product to be sold
to advertisers via networks and exchanges, these publishers realize
that they can develop products to sell their deeply engaged and loyal
audiences — directly.”
Loyalty comes from relationship building
Publishers Audience Advertisers
Source: Montalenti, Andrew. “The Great Reckoning in Digital Attention.” thinkgrowth.org

5. “Rather than treating their readers and viewers as a product to be sold
to advertisers via networks and exchanges, these publishers realize
that they can develop products to sell their deeply engaged and loyal
audiences — directly.”
Loyalty comes from relationship building
Publishers Products Audience
Source: Montalenti, Andrew. “The Great Reckoning in Digital Attention.” thinkgrowth.org

6. Getting buy-in
Agree on an isolated project
• By starting with a single, well thought-
out project, you create a testing ground:
for the project, and for buy-in
• Slate’s project was to launch an infinite
scroll readership experience

7. Getting buy-in
Set concrete project goals
• Slate’s infinite scroll:
• Goal: great user experience
• Metric: engaged time
• HuffPost’s newsletters:
• Goal: De-generalize content and get
at pointed, real questions
• Metrics: FB interactions, clicks, time
spent on newsletter content

8. Getting buy-in
Share results & find a core metric
• Find KPIs relevant to each project.
• What is the one metric that each of these
projects, performed by any department,
has in common? That’s your north star
metric.

9. Getting buy-in
Land & expand
• Apply that core metric team-by-team to
unify the entire organization
• Slate’s product team proved the success
of their infinite scroll project in a way that
incentivized editorial and commercial
teams.
• Engaged time is a metric that validates
individual work and rolls up into broader
business goals.

10. Finding and monetizing loyal audiences
What parts of your content are habit-forming?
• Communities
• Podcasts
• Newsletters
• Events
• Homepage

11. Why does the homepage matter?
80%
of homepage visitors
are return visitors
11%
of referrals to posts
come from a homepage
10–50%
conversion rate for
links on the homepage
30 seconds
or fewer spent by visitors on a
homepage before clicking on a post

12. Parse.ly Professional Services offers…
• Custom Analysis - Competitive set benchmarking report, tailored
to publisher's goals, or other interesting perspectives using
Parse.ly’s network data.
• Consultation - Audience development consulting for growth,
promotion, beat hiring, taxonomy audits, and more.
• Technical Services - Assistance building upon Parse.ly's toolset,
facilitating integration, or custom data pulls (sans analysis).
Interested in a half-day workshop?
Email me! kelsey@parsely.com

13. hello@parsely.com @parsely parse.ly
Get in touch!