“Overall, almost 50% of our titles are now experiencing year-over-year growth,” Little said, “and that’s partly due to the changes at Google.”

Google Discover promotes “soft lens” content – ​​but isn’t so good for news

Google Discover is integrated into the browsing experience for most users who browse Google Chrome on a smartphone.

Little said that Discover “is almost like Facebook was… it’s served algorithmically, it’s based on what it thinks you’re going to like. It’s more of an escape-type outlet.”

The increase in Google traffic at Reach is partly due to greater visibility into how Google Discover works. Previously, Little said, it was “even more of a black box than research.”

It’s now much easier to monitor your own and your competitors’ performance on Discover, according to Little. Two years ago, it wouldn’t have even been possible for a publisher to split their discovery and search traffic, but now “you can get a much better idea of ​​what’s working and what’s not.”

Little said 44 percent of Reach content is scraped in Google Discover, but the platform is “very selective about what it takes and what it doesn’t take… Google clearly wants Discover to be an environment safe, with brand-safe content.” he”.

He described the type of content that performs well on Discover as “soft lens”: first-person articles work well, as do lifestyle content and articles on niche interests and other sports. than football.

“What’s also interesting is that for us, as a commercial publisher, we don’t put a lot of news content into Discover,” Little said. “And by news, I mean traditional local news, or more difficult news.”

Reach’s news content still holds up to search, Little said, but there’s “always a lag time for the content to get to Discover.” Although articles sometimes arrive on Discover within the same day, “it usually takes 24 to 48 hours before the content actually arrives,” which necessarily poses a problem for news content.

“You don’t find any judicial content there, no crime enters there, and the content of our council doesn’t enter there either. Stuff from our Reporters on local democracy doesn’t really fit into Discover.

“We need this content – ​​it’s the foundation of our regional brands, and it’s frustrating to see the BBCThis version of this story happens every time, but we never see commercial publishers really integrate this kind of content. So it seems that Google, on Discover, is using the BBC to distribute it, but is not really being very pluralistic in its approach.

(Learn more: Publishers Addicted to Google Discover Traffic Risk a Race to the Bottom)

Google Discover selects “curiosity gap” titles to show to readers

Little said Discover has a notable preference for headlines about the “curiosity gap.” For every article published by a Reach journalist, they must write four headlines: one for Facebook, one for search, one for the homepage and one for newsletters.

“Each of them is written in different ways,” Little said. “The search will be focused on keywords and the search on the home page will be completely brand-safe. Newsletters (headlines) tend to be a bit more salesy…to encourage them to click…and social media needs to be pretty brand safe too.

You can’t populate Discover with a specific title: Instead, the platform chooses “the one it wants most,” and Little said Discover most often searches for “the most enticing title” or “the item the most emotional.”

Little defined the curiosity gap as “telling the story like it is but holding back the information needed to know in that headline so that people still feel the need to go find out more.” (Proponents of the curiosity gap argue that it differs from a “clickbait” headline strategy because curiosity gap articles actually provide the information in the headline.)

He gave the following real Reach headlines as examples: “ITV Loose Women’s Janet Street-Porter speaks out from hospital after major surgery”, “BBC Death in Paradise star quits after five years, but fans will be happy with its release” and “NHS symptoms of silent killer, which affects one in 20 people but takes years to diagnose”.

In the latter case, Little said, “It’s a very direct and factual headline, but it makes you think, ‘Well, what are these symptoms?’ »…And as long as you provide them on the other side, Discover rewards you pretty heavily. .”

Reach uses newsletters and Whatsapp communities to create thematic audiences from Google Discover traffic

Little said Reach doesn’t want the proportion of articles going into Google Discover to become too large.

“You won’t want to depend too much on it,” he said, noting that “our portfolio is more diverse, in terms of the ways we generate traffic, than it has ever been.”

Technology platforms do for notoriously unreliable long-term traffic sourcesand Little said Reach tries to turn its Discover visitors into loyal readers.

“A fine example on the Daily Express would be that the Daily Express is doing very well with Formula 1 content on Discover.

“We have built a newsletter audience of around 32,000 people, and a WhatsApp Community of more than 3,000 people, targeting people coming from Discover on F1.

“L’Express doesn’t have the same visibility on Formula 1 on any other platform (like) on Discover, so we know that the generation of this newsletter audience is directly connected to the people passing through…

“We’re focused on thinking, ‘How can we ensure that this traffic is ours over a long period of time?’

(Learn more: Whatsapp for Publishers: How Reach Generates Millions of Page Views Through the Messaging App)

Little suggested, Discover was one of the ways Google responded to the trend of avoidance of news.

“Ultimately, for us as a publisher, in some ways Google Discover is a good thing, because it makes us really think: If this is where the audience’s interest is, it is what he’s engaging with, how can we start diversifying our content mix to get a wider range of topics in everything we do?

“And I think that’s actually a good thing because it makes us more diverse, it opens us up to new audiences that we couldn’t have had before, it makes us think about content in a different way.

“But all our principles remain valid: the content must be high quality, it must be well researched, it must be very well written and have good images.”

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