Matthew Hindman wrote "Stickier News," an evaluation of digital news strategies that was published by the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy in April 2015. 

 

The subtitle is "What Newspapers Don't Know About Web Traffic Has Hurt Them Badly — But There is a Better Way." Here are some of his best ideas.

 

Five ways to make sure your digital newspaper works well

 

1. Your home page and articles load quickly.

2. Your site works painlessly on smartphones and tablets.

3. You don't have a hard paywall.

4. You focus on who reads your site, how often and for how long — not how much money you make from ads or paywalls.

5. You are willing to change your site's appearance and posting practices, especially in reaction to feedback from your readers.

 

Slow sites can be fatal

 

A Google experiment found that even a half-second delay in loading a web page results in decreased traffic over time. People have the ability to notice these lost fractions of time, even if they don’t know it themselves.

 

Hindman found that stickiness, defined as “compounded audience growth” over time, “is the most urgent problem facing journalism today.”

 

So what can you do? Hindman said his “single most consistent finding” across the spectrum of information about web traffic “is that faster load times lead to higher traffic” and that “even tiny user delays, on the order of 100 milliseconds, have been shown to reduce traffic.”

 

You want a speedy site — one that pleases the eye and where folks will return. When you look at your analytics numbers, keep an eye on how many unique visitors you have and also, separately, how fast pages load.

 

Hindman’s message to news editors: “If your site is slow, you are bleeding traffic day after day after day. If your site does not work seamlessly on mobile or tablet devices, drop everything and fix it. If your home page does not have at least some visible new content every hour, you are throwing away traffic.”

 

In order to stay solvent, Hindman argued, “Newspapers need to focus not on total traffic, but on stickiness – on a site’s growth rate over time.” Focus on having a slightly larger audience per month, every month.

 

Invest in technology and support staff

 

Hindman recommended reevaluating how much you are willing to spend on your technology personnel and infrastructure. Analytics services such as Chartbeat offer methods for tracking users, which is necessary for A/B testing. Hindman says that while this may sound intimidating, it doesn’t have to be: “Many vendors now provide A/B testing as a service with just a few extra lines of code on the target web page.” 

 

But you can do this, and the technology is not necessarily cost-prohibitive, although “newspapers must spend money to hire new staff, especially technical staff.” Hindman stressed that tech workers are just as important and mandatory for newspapers as printing presses, and hiring someone who will actually get to know your newspaper is a better plan than outsourcing your tech work. Don’t make the mistake of putting your lowest-paid or least-experienced worker in charge of technology.

 

Hindman argues that paywalls lower traffic and advertising revenue over time, and that hard paywalls are more of a deterrent than “soft” or metered paywalls — those that allow users to view a certain number of articles per day or per month before making them pay.

 

If you feel you need a paywall, soft paywalls are better, Hindman argued, because “most newspaper site users visit just a few times a month ... Metered paywalls thus ask for subscription revenue only from heavier users,” the people who are more likely to pay a monthly or yearly fee to view your site in the first place.

 

If readers choose to pay, that’s great, but most choose not to pay, and when they remember that your site requires money, they look for alternative options. If your readers look for alternative news sources, so will your advertisers.

 

His prediction for the future is rather dour: “Digital audiences are small, digital revenue is paltry, and paywalls have significant long-term costs.”

 

He argues multiple times that while having a good Web presence is important, a good news provider will also maintain a print edition, because “Even The New York Times get only one-fifth of its total revenue from digital (traffic).”

 

Because of the way ads are sold, he says, digital ads are often tied to print ads, and “if newspapers really did end their print editions, much of this joint digital revenue would quickly disappear too.”