What’s behind Newsweek’s traffic growth?

Awtry told Press Gazette that “the bulk” of Newsweek’s visits came from Google Search, Google Discover and Google News.

“We listen very carefully Google signals,” he said. “We don’t want to game the system. But if we see increased, stable traction in a coverage area, that, to me, doesn’t mean gaming a system, it means that readers are interested, that they’re hungry for content in that area. So we’re going to look at hiring staff by looking for angles.

Google Discoveryhe said, has “been a pillar of where our audience comes from” during the year and a half he worked at Newsweek. Discover is a personalized feed that is automatically presented to Google app users when they open an empty tab on their smartphone. appears to have increased as a referral traffic source for publishers this year.

A Newzdash analysis published in August found that Google Discover generated 55.6% of Google traffic among publishers assessed earlier this year, an increase of 14 percentage points from 2023.

“Our news content still does a good job on Google Discover, but increasingly, a lot of our lifestyle content is doing well,” Awtry said. “If a person does something (and) it goes viral on social media, we’re going to contact them, talk to them, interview them, do this story – these kinds of stories, these real people and these real voices do good work for us on Google Discover…

“The signal is not just to make viral stories easier, but to try to understand why they were viral.”

In addition to Google Discover, Awtry said Newsweek has “really beefed up” its reporting. SEO team in recent months, and that “we are looking at Google News signals much more carefully than ever before…

“I wouldn’t say they have a specific goal, but we certainly track how many times Newsweek appears in the top carousel on Google News, and we’re trying to expand on that.”

But he pointed out that Newsweek’s page views have grown faster than the number of unique users, and that page views per visitor have “virtually doubled,” from about 2 to 2.5 in two years.

“This is a positive signal: we are increasing our direct readership,” he said. “People don’t come to us through Google but through our own surfaces, whether it’s, thank God, those people who bookmark newsweek.com – that’s great – but more and more newsletters , push alerts.”

What does Newsweek’s content look like?

On Sunday, November 3, two days before the US presidential election, Newsweek published 140 articles, of which 62 (or 44%) covered sports news or promoted partner sports betting services. Another 44 stories (31%) were related to politics. The two types of content collectively represent three-quarters of the articles published on the site.

The remaining stories covered health, science, weather and current affairs, as well as softer lifestyle stories and social media content rewrites.

The latter content resembles the viral lifestyle stories that were common online during the heyday of Facebook traffic referrals, under headlines like “Rescued cows say goodbye to sick friend in heartbreaking clip” And “Student asks for extra mayo on fries and gets more than she bargained for“. However, as Awtry described it, almost all of these articles on Newsweek involve an interview with the author of the viral content, whereas other editors publish quick rewrites without further work.

Other recurring themes in Newsweek content include dogs, product recalls and the state of Texas. The site publishes daily articles aimed at helping people solve New York Times Wordle and Connections puzzles, and has published a few articles focused on AI chatbot answers, e.g.What a Second Donald Trump Term Would Look Like, According to ChatGPT and Grok” And “What ‘Yellowstone’ Fans Should Watch Next, According to ChatGPT“.

“Our future lies in using traffic from Google as the start of an interaction, not the end result”

He was asked if Newsweek was concerned about being overexposed to Google: which has been an unpredictable source of traffic for publishers in recent years — Awtry said: “Every publisher has to worry about this…anytime we are completely beholden to someone else to bring us our new readers, it’s a risk. »

He added: “We really like Google, we have a good relationship with Google, but we can’t count on them always being there to send us readers.”

Citing previous disruptive Google algorithm changes and its ongoing rollout of AI Overviews, which is expected to impact publisher traffic benchmarksAwtry said Newsweek tries to view Google’s surge in visits as “a gift” but not an end in itself.

The audience team he oversees has “grown significantly,” he said, recently adding “a deeper technology stack to better understand the segment and speak to readers” by offering them “ personalized experiences” that will hopefully keep them coming back in the future.

“It’s no different than what we do with any newspaper or any news site and their advertising technology, getting the right ads to the right people,” he explained.

“If you’re coming and it’s your first time, let’s not send you a pop-up to subscribe to Newsweek. Let’s not even bother with a newsletter. Let’s just let you read the story you wanted to read.

“Is this my second time coming back?” Yeah, maybe we’ll ask you if you’re interested in the newsletter. If this is the third political story you’ve read on this visit, even if it’s your first visit, yes, we’re going to ask you about a political newsletter.

“We’re trying to become much more sophisticated in how we manage these lifecycle journeys. Sometimes the best way is to do nothing, but sometimes the best thing is to ask someone to just like us on social media – or if they’re from Reddit, to acknowledge that they’re from Reddit.

“The tech stack for us has come into play over the last month, so these are new tools. But for us, this is our future: using traffic from Google as the start of an interaction, not the end result.

(Learn more: ‘Speed’ and ‘fairness’ are key tactics for growing Newsweek on US election night)

Newsweek turns to Reddit to acquire new readers away from Google

Awtry said Newsweek aims to differentiate itself from the competition in part through active engagement with its audience, which has manifested itself in a focus on its comments section and Reddit. The site receives “thousands of comments a day, sometimes more than 10,000,” Awtry said, and “we just hired a new community manager whose job is not just to remove bad comments, but to actually highlight the best of them, to present them, to encourage civil debate.

Awtry attributes Reddit’s focus in part to “extremely fluctuating” search engine traffic.

“We are looking to diversify the origins of our new readers. The bulk of them still come from Google-related services – we can’t always count on that. So we started using Reddit a lot more.

Reddit appealed, he said, because it was a place where users interacted with each other, and Newsweek used it “extensively — not just posting all of our stories in Reddit’s subreddit.” news or something like that, but really trying to read the niche subreddit space.

“If we do a story about how Gen Z can’t afford housing, we’ll go to the Gen Z subreddit, we’ll make sure we can post it there, we’ll put it there. “

He said Reddit wouldn’t work for publishers hoping to use it “as a page view driver.”

“We use it as a reputation signal, as a brand signal, as a way to take the pulse of how we are perceived.”

(Learn more: Platform Profile – Why Publishers Need to Be Careful to Succeed on Reddit)

E-mail [email protected] to point out errors, provide story tips, or submit a letter for publication on our blog “Letters Page”