I didn’t know what to expect when I walked into this panel “Comments Are Terrible: But They Don’t Have To Be” presented by Erica Palan, Audience Engagement Manager at Philly.com; Greg Barber, Lead on Strategy & Partnerships at The Washington Post and Talia Stroud, Associate Professor at The University of Texas at Austin.
And to be honest, I wasn’t very excited about this. The comments section is probably filled with trolls, so why even bother, right? Well it turns out I was terribly wrong because this turned out to be a highly engaging and interactive session!
Even though this session focused primarily on the comments sections of news sites, what was shared can and should be applied to the way we, as advertisers, treat the comments sections of our content.
All three of the presenters admit that they’ve had their fair share of trolls, but for every troll they encounter, they’ve had five good comments that have not only shown support, but also given them new ideas and angles for stories.
Erica kick started the panel by sharing a video she did over at Philly.com, where she got journalists to read the bad comments they’ve gotten on their articles (very much like “Celebrities Read Mean Tweets” with Jimmy Kimmel). You can check it out here:
For Greg, he believes that the comments section is important and should be paid more attention to because it is the place that lets you connect and engage with your audience. More likely than not, the people who actually bother to comment (the good ones at least) are most probably your most loyal readers.
Talia, who did very extensive research on commenters (that she later shared) also believes that the comments section is a great place to learn more about your audience. It’s a gold mine of data for journalists to find new sources, new stories, and also what resonates the most with your audience.
For the research that she did with the Engaging News Project, Talia shared key learnings that include:
How is this relevant to us as marketers?
While we might not get as many trolls on a brand social media post because most of the people who opt to see your posts already like your brand, we still get our fair share of haters. And the thing to remember is that some of these people might actually have a point to a bad comment and review.
As marketers, we should be paying more attention to the comments section and take the time to reply to good AND bad comments to better engage with our audience. The comments on a social media post may not be as insightful as those on a new post because of the nature of the content, but it still shouldn’t be ignored.
The full research can be downloaded here at: http://engagingnewsproject.org/research/survey-of-commenters-and-comment-readers/
You’ve probably heard of Ad-blockers and what they do. Heck, you probably already have one installed as well. I’ll admit that I have been ignorant about Ad-blockers, but this session, “It’s Adblockageddon! How To Survive And Prosper,” by James Schad, Innovation Director for Vizeum U.K., opened my eyes to a world of information about Ad-blocking that’s shocking and thoroughly insightful.
James broke his presentation down into three parts:
1. Scale of impact
2. Reasons behind adoption
3. Solutions
1. Scale of impact
Ad-blockers surfaced in the early 90s before growing into the monster that it is today and the funny thing is, I didn’t even know that it’s slowly becoming such a big thing. And as an advertiser, I should know about this because the rise of Ad-blockers would mean that it’s only going to become increasingly harder for us to talk to the people we want to.
Results showing the percentage of people who block ads in the U.K., Finland and Texas.
These numbers are only going to keep rising as ads and ad formats become increasingly invasive.
Aside from the scary numbers that he showed, he also explained that now the time spent on mobile phones is starting to match up with that spent on desktops. So not only has this Ad-blocking monster grown on a desktop, it’s starting to appear on mobile phones too.
James shared these statistics he got from the GlobalWebIndex.
There is even news that one of the U.K.’s mobile operators is striking a deal with an Isreali Ad-blocking developer to research on network-level Ad-blocking. That’s crazy!
And this is especially scary for advertisers, publishers and media companies not only because of the amount of ad money being wasted, but because some of the ads we do are actually for a good cause.
Amount of money spent on advertising for good causes in the U.K. in 2015.
2. Reasons behind adoption
Top 5 reasons why people block ads in the U.K.
James shared some reasons on why the people in the U.K. are blocking ads and also elaborated a little more on some of them.
A. They’re interruptive
B. Can be annoying
C. Slows down web browsing
D. Often irrelevant
E. Concerns about privacy.
For the reason that they’re annoying, James said that one of the main causes of that is retargeting ads. He shared that a recent Google study showed that as retargeting ads start getting more popular, the search for Ad-blockers starts to rise too.
As for the loading speeds of pages, not only do the more complicated ads make it even harder to load pages, it’s also starting to cost more for advertisers, publishers and media agencies.
Cost to load advertising content vs. Cost to load editorial content.
And finally, privacy is one of the more controversial reasons, and he even highlighted the EU General Data Protection Regulation (Coming 2018) that mandates that the processing of all personal data will require the unambiguous consent of the user.
3. Solutions
At this point, after blowing our minds (well mine at least) with all of the above, James started sharing some of the solutions that are currently available right now.
Extreme Measures
So for starters, the very same people who developed Ad-blockers came up with Ad-Block Plus, a modified type of Ad-blocker that allowed publishers and advertisers to make their ads acceptable and displayed for users, at a price.
Unwilling to sacrifice their ad revenue for something like Ad-Block Plus, some publishers took matters into their own hands and started blocking people from accessing their content unless they disable their Ad-blockers.
Thing is, what most people don’t know is that many of their favorite websites are free to them because of ad revenue. Fifty percent of the people in the U.K. don’t know that and 39 percent of them choose not to disable their Ad-blockers to visit their favorite websites.
Pretty extreme solutions right there, but there are also some that are actually less drastic and actually do make a little sense.
Seemingly Milder Measures
Google came up with the Contributor program, where users can choose to contribute any amount we want, on a monthly basis, to visit Google partner sites like Mashable and the Onion, without having to see ads. The money collected will go to the sites themselves rather than Google.
There’s also Facebook’s recently launched instant articles that strip the content of ads to allow it to load faster within the FB app itself. Thing is, Facebook is actually taking 30 percent of the ad revenue from the publishers for themselves.
With these solutions, publishers are still on the losing end, and Facebook and Google are slowly becoming the new cable companies, deciding what type of content gets distributed on the web.
So how can we get back to an Internet where it’s a little fairer for everybody?
Milder Measures
Well for one, there are many more distributors available like Snapchat and WeChat who are pushing content from publishers that the user can choose to view, but only if they want to.
Quartz has also developed a new app that serves content to their users in the form of messages where they can choose to reply and ask questions to get more information about things they find interesting.
Buzzfeed also has been doing a great job (so great that they just announced Swarm at SXSW) of distributing the right content out to their users by publishing where their users are (through web, FB, YouTube, their App, Snapchat), instead of forcing them to consume primarily on the web.
Where do we go from here?
As James said in his session, “Ad-blocking is an existential threat to an ad-funded web.” We need to first recognize that this is a problem, before we can start to figure out what to do about.
The numbers and data can make it seem like it’s going to be real bad, but actually, if we look at it from another angle, widespread Ad-blocking can force us to go back to creating ads that are simpler, more elegant and more human. And maybe that’s what the web needs right now.
James also wrapped up his session with three key takeaways for publishers, advertisers and us users.
Is The Future Of Content Going To Be Ruled By Machines?
By Cody Liew
AUSTIN, TEXAS -- I’ve been here at SXSW for two days and I must say, it’s been amazing. The best part about all of this so far, aside from the panel sessions and workshops, is walking around the city, meeting random people and hearing their stories.
The track I’m following is Content and Distribution, and the most popular debate so far (based on the sessions I managed to get to) has been about Human vs. Machine Generated Content. And this got me thinking, which actually creates better content that will truly connect and resonate with audiences?
