In January, media professionals identified the role of journalism in society, monetization, and mobile optimization as their top three priorities for 2017. Now we’re taking a look back at the data to see how these trends played out over the course of the year.
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What data says about 2017
We take a look at data from 2017 to understand how top trends and priorities
played out over the course of the year, including:
Trends in mobile vs desktop
Influence of platforms on journalism
Monetization efforts, audience loyalty, and subscriptions
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“Desktop dies on weekends”
While the ratio of mobile to desktop traffic remains around 1:1 during the week, it’s
closer to 2:1 on the weekends.
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Mobile habits don’t always match desktop ones
While it doesn’t make the overall list of top external referrers to Parse.ly’s network,
Flipboard is the 4th most common mobile referrer.
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Engagement rates for content: “Good” vs “Bad”
Of “good” visits, 44% last over one
minute
If a user spends 30-60 seconds reading
your content, they are engaged. If they
spend over a minute on your content,
they are more engaged than most
website visitors on any Internet content
A closer look at engagement rates reaffirms audiences have an appetite for long-form
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Top referrals by Facebook (topic)
Lifestyle - 87.1%
Local Events - 61.4%
Entertainment - 60.8%
U.S. Presidential Politics - 59.5%
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Diversifying revenue away from advertising
Combined, Facebook and Google now capture roughly 75% of digital ad
spending in the U.S.
“It’s clear that the broken system is ad-driven media
on the internet. It simply doesn’t serve people. In fact,
it’s not designed to.” -Ev Williams, CEO, Medium
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Emphasis on subscription models
The New York Times announced
reaching 3.5 million paid
subscribers, more than double the
subscriber count since 2015
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Subscription growth attributed to “Trump Bump”
We measured the average engaged time for
articles by topic and found that politics
news was in fact capturing the most
attention for the first six months of 2017
Measuring engaged time instead of page
views could help publishers connect the
dots between user experience and
premium products or membership models.
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Thinking about loyalty in terms of engagement
After excluding “bad” visits that last under 15 seconds, half of the visits to media content
last between 1 and 7 minutes.
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Pivot to (or away from) video
“Pivot to video” has been mentioned ~14,000 times on social media this year