London – A new report on online publishers released by Intent HQ opens up a compelling debate on the gap between readership and social affinity and how strong social titles can monetise their popularity. The study also underlines the growing globalisation of UK online reading habits, with the New York Times coming top of the UK social affinity list.
Although The Economist, The Guardian, The Financial Times also appear in the ‘Top 25 UK Publishers’ list ranked by social affinity, there is a notable absence of ‘born digital’ publishing brands. For example BuzzFeed, known for its mobile-friendly, shareable content, ranked outside the front-runners. The research also revealed that certain titles such as Vogue, which have a relatively small, niche online readership, also have a high social affinity. Conversely, readers felt a relatively low social affinity with the entertainment site IMDB, even though it has a huge number of visitors each month.
The results fuel current discussions around the comparative values of ‘social velocity’ versus ‘social affinity’. A recent ranking – based on velocity – named BuzzFeed as the top social site, but as the Intent HQ report’s author, Haydn Shaughnessy, explains: “Velocity is often quoted as it is more straightforward. However, social affinity digs deeper than simple shares and offers far more for publishing brands; it helps them to understand the relationship they are building with their readers.”
Social velocity measures the number of times and the pace at which a story is ‘liked’ on Facebook or shared on Twitter. Social affinity is a measure of the sharing and referencing activity of people across many billions of instances – a minimum of 100 million Twitter accounts and the past 3,000 tweets of each, coupled with references in blogs and sharing channels.
Jonathan Lakin, CEO of Intent HQ says: “The analyst firm Forrester calls affinity ‘the Holy Grail’ for more effective brand marketing and it’s clear that the publishers of these highly-rated titles need to harness this popularity in some way. To-date online publisher metrics have focused on impressions and visitor accounts, but this is like measuring the number of people who go through your store without buying anything. It does very little to measure the strength of a relationship”.
He concludes: “The next step for publishers who have established this position is to reinforce it with a better understanding of the types of content readers really want to engage with and to bring the social conversation back into their own platforms. To do this, Intent HQ can now help publishers to create an interest fingerprint of audiences and visitors by combining their own audience data sources to social data to better serve personalised content to their customers”.
The white paper, titled ‘The Publishers’ Dilemma’ is the second part of an extensive programme benchmarking social media, brands and influencers. To read the entire report and see the full list of top social publishers visit www.intenthq.com.
About Intent HQ
Intent HQ is a UK based technology company that uses social data to build an ‘interest fingerprint’ of each user, understanding affinities between interests and intents in a human-like way. This allows for greater understanding, targeting and activation of online experiences. Clients include Sports Revolution, Telegraph Media, The Food Network, Zequs, IDG and Sky.
