Recently a source in The Boston Globe newsroom forwarded to me a memo sent to the staff about the paper’s performance in Google search during 2024. “We get 25%-27% of our traffic from Google; it’s a significant way we reach people who don’t come to the Globe on their own,” wrote Ronke Idowu Reeves, the paper’s SEO editor. (SEO stands for search-engine optimization.)
As you might imagine, the big SEO winners in 2024 were the Karen Read trial, the phrase “who won the debate” (perhaps a reference to both presidential debates), the Celtics victory parade and Steward Health Care.
The memo, though, prompted another thought: What is the purpose of SEO in the age of paywalls? As you probably know, the Globe has an especially strict paywall, with no quota of gift links for the month. I emailed Reeves and asked her whether SEO was successful in getting casual visitors to sign up for a digital subscription given that they couldn’t read even the one story they’d searched for. She forwarded my email to spokeswoman Carla Kath, who told me by email: “Yes, a good number of people do read and subscribe to our stories that they encounter on search. But, because the scope of search is constantly changing, we are always adjusting how we approach it.”
It’s something I’d like to dig into more deeply at some point since it’s fundamental to the economics of digital news. Twenty years ago, paywalls were rare, and the idea behind SEO was to drive massive audiences to your stories so that they’d see the ads that accompanied them. The first iteration of The Huffington Post stressed SEO heavily, and its infamous 2011 headline “What Time Is the Super Bowl?” has been called “the most legendary act of SEO trolling ever.”
During his early days of owning The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos complained that it took HuffPost “17 minutes” to write up a summary of a story that had taken actual journalists months to report — and the HuffPost summary and the ads that were published alongside it were seen by more people because the HuffPost was better at SEO than the WashPost.
But the incentives have changed. Tech platforms such as Google, Facebook and Craigslist have scooped up most of the digital advertising while driving its value through the floor. The purpose of SEO today is to entice casual visitors into subscribing. I would think that’s harder to do with no gift links, but, as I said, Kath told me it’s working at the Globe.
Last week, Sophie Culpepper, who covers local news for Nieman Lab, reported on some fascinating research that was published in Journalism Studies on what does and doesn’t work in enticing people into buying a digital subscription when they hit a story that’s been paywalled. She doesn’t mention SEO, but the two are related, since SEO is one of the main ways that visitors are going to encounter a story they’d like to read. Two findings:
- “Less is more,” as Culpepper puts it. In other words, someone is more likely to subscribe if they can only see the headline instead of, say, the headline, the teaser and maybe even a photo and the lead. Or as the co-authors of the study write, “Reducing the information density of teaser elements on paywalled articles and offering discounts may help newspapers increase their online subscriber numbers.”
- People like discounts. In fact, discounts increase the chance that someone will pay for a subscription by 3.35 times, which was the only factor the researchers found that was statistically significant. Culpepper quotes the authors: “Offering a direct discount may provide visitors with the feeling that they are receiving a tangible benefit and encourage them to subscribe.”
Culpepper’s summary suggests that the study does not address whether five or 10 gift links per month serve to drive paid subscriptions. I imagine that it would, since prospective subscribers would get to sample a news organization’s journalism a few times before deciding whether to pay. Then again, I could see gift links serving as a disincentive as well, since that might be all that some people want (although first a subscriber has to give them those links).
No mention, either, of something that comes up on social media all the time — day passes or per-article fees, which almost no one offers, and which would obviously lead to fewer subscriptions. I did encounter one recently, and I gladly paid for what I wanted to read without having to take out a full subscription. I can’t remember where I saw it.
The arguments I’ve heard against per-article fees and day passes are that they’re not worth the investment in technology, and that, as I said, they’ll move quite a few would-be subscribers to make a one-time purchase instead.
I can’t speak to the technical issues. But how about geotagging articles so that researchers and one-time visitors who live outside the circulation area can buy a single article and those inside would need to pay for a subscription? If it can be done for sports on cable TV, it can be done for digital news.
Media notes
• The AP and the White House. What began as a ridiculous complaint by Donald Trump over The Associated Press’ decision to stick with the name Gulf of Mexico rather than “Gulf of America” has turned into something more serious. Marc Caputo of Axios reports that the Trump administration is angry over all sorts of style decisions made by the AP, whose iconic stylebook is used by many news outlets. Among those decisions: capitalizing “Black” but not “white”; using the phrase “gender-affirming care”; and advising against the phrase “illegal immigrant.” Axios, by the way, caved in on “Gulf of America” like a Florida sinkhole.
• Meet your friendly ghost journalist. Gannett is launching a program so that members of the public will have a chance to meet its journalists, reports Diane Sylvester for the trade website Editor & Publisher. “We want our readers to know who we are, how we do our work, and that we live side by side with them in the community,” says Michael Anastasi, senior vice president of Gannett’s USA Today Network. Well, then. I just want to point out that Gannett publishes multiple weekly papers in Eastern Massachusetts that literally have no journalists.
• Harassment and student journalists. I’m thrilled that Nieman Reports has published an article by Northeastern alum Marta Hill on how journalism schools can help their students deal with on-the-job harassment. Hill, a former editor of The Huntington News who’s now a graduate student at New York University, wrote a paper for her honors-in-the-discipline thesis last spring under my supervision. Her full thesis is online here.
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