When visiting news sites, I almost always look at their “Most Popular” lists to see what other people are reading and find stories I may have otherwise missed. These lists are helpful navigation tools that surface popular content and entice readers to stay on a site.
But while they serve a similar purpose, Most Popular features vary greatly in appearance, placement and functionality.
I talked with editors at CNN Digital, The Washington Post, msnbc.com, The New York Times and Gawker about the way they’ve designed these features, the information they share on them, and what they have (and in some cases haven’t) done to help readers understand the information.
Here are the key ways news sites are using Most Popular features, along with editors’ thoughts on what works well.
Use language that’s specific.
The language we use to describe popularity matters. News sites use a variety of different phrases — “Most Popular,” “Most Emailed,” “Most Viewed,” “Most Searched” and “Most Blogged” — and change them when they don’t resonate with readers.
Rich Meislin, a former editor-in-chief of New York Times Digital who now works as a Times consultant, said “Most Blogged” and “Most Searched” used to be tabs on the Times’ Most Popular module but weren’t used nearly as much as the “Most Emailed” tab.
Nytimes.com removed them from the box last year after launching a “Recommended” engine, which tracks the content readers consume and recommends stories that may be of interest to them. Meislin said it’s worth having Most Viewed and Most Emailed lists because they tell readers a different story.
“The Most Viewed list tends to track a little more closely things that are being heavily played on the home page,” he said by phone. “The Most Emailed list tends to be a more eclectic, quirkier selection of stories from the site and often surfaces things that are deeper inside the site.”
I prefer the terms “Most Emailed” and “Most Viewed” because they help describe popularity. Lists that are titled “Most Popular” and aren’t clear about what “popular” means, can lead to uncertainty: Is the popularity of the stories based on number of views? Number of comments? Number of times the story has been shared? It’s hard to tell.
Show how many people have viewed a story.
While some readers might not know or care what “Most Popular” means, news sites have found that there’s value in specificity. CNN Digital uses a feature called “NewsPulse” to track stories. Next to each story listed in the feature, there’s a red bar that expands as a story grows in popularity. The bars help readers visualize relative reader interest in a story.
-
- NewsPulse shows when the story was updated, the number of comments on each story and the number of times each story has been shared on Facebook.
NewsPulse lists the number of comments the story has and the number of times it’s been shared. Meredith Artley, CNN Digital’s managing editor and vice president, said these details — coupled with the bars — help put “popularity” in context.
“We don’t say a story has gotten X page views, but we represent how big a story is visually with that red bar, and I think it’s more telling that way,” Artley said by phone. “I think what matters most to our audiences is the overall representation of popularity. As journalists, we all know what page views mean because we look at them in our industry, but it’s kind of like putting ratings on a TV screen. It’s a little inside baseball.”
Msnbc.com’s Most Popular features colored bars to illustrate each story’s popularity too, but also prominently showcases the number of views for each story. “The colored blue bars are proportional to the numbers, so you really get a sense of how much more popular something like Hurricane Irene was compared to some other stories on the list,” said Ashley Wells, vice president of creative development for msnbc.com. The number of views for each story is listed next to the colored blue bars, making it easier for readers to make sense of popularity.
-
- When you hover over the number of views on the right-hand side of Gawker’s Most Popular module, you’ll see a popup showing the number of current readers on the story.
Gawker takes it a step further by showing the number of views and comments on each story in its Most Popular list. By mousing over the page views, readers can see how many people are currently on a particular page. (The site also lists page views and unique visitors by author.) Scott Kidder, director of editorial operations, said via email that there’s no sense in hiding traffic figures: “We believe that for data to have impact, it needs to be front and center.”
Other sites are still divided over what to do.
Washington Post Managing Editor Raju Narisetti said he’s unsure what the value is in sharing page views. “In real time, it is valuable proprietary information, given that aggregators are constantly trying to one-up original content creation sites,” he told me. “It’s a little bit of a technology issue for us,” he said, “and also a matter of convincing a lot of my other colleagues that that level of transparency is good.”
Break up information categorically.
-
- The Washington Post’s “Post Most” feature lists most popular stories by section. Here are the most popular stories from the Lifestyle section.
Just as many sites have navigation bars directing readers to particular sections, some “most popular” features parse content topically. The Washington Post’s “Most Popular” widget, which it calls “The Post Most,” changes from section to section. The politics section features the most popular political stories, while the lifestyle section features the most popular lifestyle stories, and so on.
CNN Digital and msnbc.com also categorize popularity within topics. Readers using their Most Popular features can easily click on a particular section — US & World, Politics, or Business, for instance — and see the most popular stories in that section.
Categorizing popularity can be helpful for both readers and journalists. Editors can, of course, look at analytics to see traffic numbers, but Artley said NewsPulse makes it easier for CNN Digital to categorize the most popular stories and see how much more popular one story is over another.
“Several times in our 8 a.m. meetings, representatives from CNN Espanol or CNN International or CNN Radio will say, ‘We have a story that’s doing well on NewsPulse, so we should do something with it on air,’” Artley said. “We’re addicted to NewsPulse internally. It’s almost an internal tool that’s public facing.”
Regularly rotate stories to show frequency, timeliness.
Some Most Popular features help surface a site’s most recent content. NewsPulse has a drop-down menu that lets readers sort the most popular stories by time — from 15 minutes ago up to 30 days ago.
-
- By clicking on the tabs, readers can sort through stories based on when they were published.
Similarly, the Times lets readers sort through the most popular stories from the last 24 hours, the last seven days and the last 30 days. Other sites such as Gawker update their Most Popular feature up to six times an hour, but don’t offer options for separating stories by time.
Break out Most Popular information onto its own page.
Many of the editors I spoke with said they’re reluctant to include too many tabs on their Most Popular features for fear of overwhelming readers. To resolve this issue, The New York Times and CNN Digital created a separate page for their Most Popular features.
The Times’ Most Popular box has a “View Complete List” link, which takes readers to a page that ranks stories by the number of times they’ve been emailed, viewed, blogged and searched.
“This is a way of surfacing content you might not have otherwise seen on the site,” Meislin said. “The more ways we can do that for our readers, the better.”
CNN’s NewsPulse is available in two places on CNN.com’s home page, including the top navigation bar. Readers who click on it are taken to a separate article page that shows a more comprehensive list of the most popular stories.
Having NewsPulse on a separate article page has been a good way to drive traffic and lower the site’s bounce rate. Traffic to the NewsPulse home page module, which averages more than 20 million views per month and has gotten as many as 2.5 million page views in one day, has increased by 20 percent over the past three months, Artley said. The increase correlates to CNN.com’s overall traffic increase. Readers who arrive on the NewsPulse page stay there for an average of two minutes, she said, and 70 percent click through to other stories within the site.
Seeing what others have read can make the news experience more communal — and at times less overwhelming. When we’re inundated with news, having a go-to list of the most viewed stories (which are often the top news stories of the day) makes it easier to see what we need to read to be “in the know.”
Improving Most Popular features
Based on my interviews and my own experience, here’s a short list of what I think works well for Most Popular features:
- Use specific language. Terms such as “Most Viewed” and “Most Emailed” are more useful than “Most Popular.” If you’re using the term “Most Popular,” explain what you mean by it.
- Show numbers. There’s value in sharing numbers of views, comments and shares because they add context to the words we use to describe popularity. I especially like that Gawker shows the number of current visitors on each story in the Most Popular list.
- Give readers the option of breaking down popularity by time and category. This can be helpful not just for readers but for section editors who want to see patterns in news over the course of an hour, day or month.
- Consider placing the feature on the right rail. Many, but not all, news sites place their Most Popular feature on the right rail. Standardizing the location of the feature could make it easier for readers to find it when jumping from site to site. I’ve found that when the feature appears at the bottom of the home page or beneath a story, I’m less likely to see it.
- Be cautious about using third-party services. Msnbc.com’s Wells and The Washington Post’s Narisetti both said they ran into problems with Omniture — the analytics service that provides the data for their Most Popular features. The Washington Post had to take down its Most Popular widget for a week because it stopped updating due to Omniture software maintenance. And msnbc.com had to temporarily remove its feature last month because of data limitations related to Omniture.
Lack of standardization
The lack of standardization in Most Popular features is a bit surprising, given that many navigation tools have become standardized over the years.
Most news sites, for instance, have a main navigation bar at the top of their home page that links to the site’s various sections. And social sharing tools (like “tweet this” and “Like” buttons), which have only been around for a couple of years, are almost always in the same “utility” area and almost always look the same from site to site. But when it comes to Most Popular features, news sites seem to be less focused on standardization.
“You have to strike a balance between taking advantage of conventions versus differentiating your brand and differentiating your user experience,” New York Times Interaction Designer Elliot Malkin told me by phone. “You want to leverage the conventional vocabularies of the Web that are already established but then you also want to deviate from that to give it your own slant and style where it merits it.”
Lack of standardization is all the more reason news sites should include specific language and data in their Most Popular features. There’s value in giving our audiences the tools they need to not only find the news, but put its popularity in perspective.
Comments