My futile attempt to measure the popularity of content

As a reader it’s often impossible to judge how well a piece of content is doing from the outside looking in. A publisher’s perception of his or her “best” content will likely vary much differently from readers due to the publisher’s institutional memory and access to metrics.

Other than comment counts, the audience is on its own when it comes to judging popularity. As a reader these metrics help me see what my peers have determined to be the “best” content the site I’m reading. Sites like Digg and Facebook have sought to create an alternative currency of popularity through the form of “diggs” and “likes” respectively, however no metric offers the complete picture. JS-Kit once tried valiantly with its “Echo” service, however they have since pivoted into a full-blown app ecosystem.

As a publisher, I’ve tried to pay close attention to how some sites are attempting to bridge this “metric gap” and here are the few options available to publisher. At the end of the list, I’ll include an alternative method that Technically Media tried with one of its projects that failed miserably.

The Methods so far

1. Gawker’s pageview count

Gawker has long included a post’s traffic and comment count publicly so readers can easily determine the “hot” post of the day. However, with its latest redesign, Gawker has lessened the impact of those metrics as the site’s new layout aims to highlight “featured” content, not necessarily the “hottest.”

In this case, Gawker’s effort to the tell the reader what its editors think are important is losing out as many of the site’s users are switching back to traditional blog format.

2. Embed a bunch of widgets.

Most sites take this route, embedding like buttons, retweet widgets and other indicators in a rainbow stew of awkwardly placed buttons that are often placed in site designs haphazardly. This is the approach we’ve taken at Technically Philly, and we’d like to get to a time where we can do something cleaner (like the popularity meta box under this post’s headline).

3. Happy Cog Tweets

When our friends and fellow Philadelphians Happy Cog created their company blog, they experimented by treating tweets as a comment thread under each post. This helps the reader easily judge a post’s popularity though I don’t think the Twitter-based system provides a thread of conversation that a traditional comment thread would.

4. NCC reactions.

When we first mocked up our vision of the Constitution Daily (with our friends at Happy Cog) we wanted to provide an easy way to see the buzz around a given post. After all, these posts were going to be about politics, so the conversation will be vibrant, right? So we created the “Reactions” metric (partly inspired by my old friends at eMediaVitals) which uses this formula:

Facebook shares + Tweets containing permalink + site comments = Reactions.

It was an awful idea. The number was confusing as content would often have “4 reactions” but no comments. Staff and readers wondered if the number was just a bug as there was no indication of the source of the reaction tally.

Combining likes with tweets was a silly way to demonstrate popularity. Clicking a Like Button takes one second and is a nearly thoughtless act of Internet approval. Retweets require a bit more investment from the reader, but still offer a sharing process with less “friction.” Commenting on the post itself, of course, requires the most thought and has the least amount of payoff for the user.

However, the Center’s blog posts often receive a high amount of conversation on Facebook but on the post itself. So this Summer we’ll be trashing the “reactions” system in favor of Facebook Comments.

Lessons Learned

The attempt to unify the “buzz” taking place around your content is futile, old-school thinking. It’s natural to want to control and combine all of those likes and retweets in a single comment thread, but the context and effort required for each action are not created equal.

Instead, embrace the chaos by sticking with one of the cardinal rules of the web: Allow your readers to consume and share your content however they wish. Do not try and combine all of the buzz your content is receiving into some magic widget or made up metric. It may be frustrating that the conversation around your content is disjointed. However, it’s time to accept that this is the new normal and there will never be a unified thread.