Despite the scattered limited metrics that publishers were able to provide— many did not keep a consistent record—we did see a consistent pattern. Key performance indicators appeared to reflect the consumption habits of a niche community with high engagement from regular return visits from what we’ve called the “super users of the story,” whom we define as news consumers who actively and passionately seek niche news on their topic of interest. The peak return rate among study respondents was 60 percent; the mean was 39 percent. In terms of traffic drivers, participants pointed to major news events within their domains. For instance, elections and political debates drive traffic to FactCheck.org and Politic365, while geopolitical headlines drive traffic to Tehran Bureau and North Korea News. Those event drivers are often unpredictable, but do work to the advantage of niche publications, boosting not just their traffic but also their brand visibility and business development. Between the peaks, publishers work to maintain momentum with core audience members. StartUp Beat has seen an effective boost from guest columns written by contributors with advanced personal followings. Both
OpenCanada and Gotham Gazette say that in-depth feature reports bring high-value users to their sites. Deep-Sea News and TreeHugger see relative spikes from stories about wildlife, with photos of cute and quirky animals. Over time, publishers have come to identify which content may go viral, and which traffic comes in at a higher value. Chad O’Carroll, Director and Managing Editor of North Korea News explained: We identified the kind of cigarettes that Kim Jung Un smokes, that went viral. But the kind of pieces that attract subscribers are tailored to North Korea watchers, students, policymakers. Yet as a broad consensus, single-subject publishers focus less on traffic volume than do traditional mainstream publications. Our respondents instead place more emphasis on their missions, measuring success not in traffic but in demonstrable impact as defined by the quality coverage and public awareness of their topics. Kelly Virella, founder of The Urban Thinker, described it as putting an emphasis on building “a high-impact journalism brand.” That choice of optimizing for impact satisfies both the mandate and model of most sites. David Sassoon at InsideClimate News sees it as key to sustaining philanthropic support. We’re not showing traffic numbers as evidence of our impact. We’re pointing to things like our Reuters collaboration and we developed others as we went along to show how we were impacting the conversation [on climate change]. We found a way to have an impact on the conversation without having to build a giant website with huge traffic. It’s very expensive and difficult to do. So we found high-impact, low-cost solutions for doing our work. That was attractive to funders.
Deep-Sea News, which is run by educators, puts an emphasis on knowledge transfer: It aims to help a broader audience gain insight into ocean life. This directive has afforded them a highly collaborative method and interaction with sites that could otherwise be considered competitors; instead of competing, they cross-promote. It’s a view shared across a handful of publishers in our study. “We don’t really work against anybody. The more people are talking about the oceans, the better for us,” said founder Craig McClain. As an indicator of impact, roughly half of our respondents posted their work to mainstream media outlets, including the cross-posting of articles written by single-subject staff writers. HealthMap has collaborated with the professional press, sharing its findings with The New England Journal of Medicine. HealthMap also found itself documenting flu outbreaks earlier this year, at a time when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was out of operation during a federal government shutdown. Another mark of influence has been imitation, or an apparent copycat influence on the wider mainstream and startup press. Bleacher Report and Fact- Check.org both saw this happen, with palpable results. Bleacher Report’s King Kaufman explained: The industry is following us around. This season, for the first time ever, ESPN has a reporter assigned to every single NFL team. So they have 32 beat writers, and they never had that before. And that’s something we’ve had since the beginning…That’s the innovation. FactCheck.org was founded with a single, guiding methodology: to take the place of focused political fact-checking desks that used to be part of newsroom operations but were downsized in cost-cutting moves. With the proven popularity of its site, Director Emeritus Brooks Jackson has seen a resurgence of the craft, with efforts like PolitiFact, a project of the Tampa Bay Times, and The Fact Checker, a microsite within the Washington Post.
Brooks Jackson said: Over the years, what I find most gratifying is the extent to which we’ve been imitated and inspired others. I used to say, whenever I was interviewed about this, that the mainstream news organizations ought to be embarrassed that it’s been left to a little Ivy League think tank [Annenberg Public Policy Center] to do work like this. I had always considered it sort of the core First Amendment responsibility.