Attracting and keeping new readers is becoming increasingly difficult, but it’s critical to your mission. You’re competing with other news outlets, search engines, and social media for attention, none of whom want to share.
But sites like Google, YouTube and Facebook continue to be the most visited sites in the world. Together, they amass more than 215 billion visits a month. They’re masters of keeping people’s attention with hyper-personalized experiences. News sites and publishers must also deliver that experience while leaning into their core strengths to attract readers and keep them coming back.
The nature of our business at Taboola is that our partners’ success is our success. We’re committed to helping news sites and other publishers thrive in a rapidly changing web. This guide is based on what’s worked for our partners.
Step 1: Attract new readers
In recent years, publisher traffic has become increasingly volatile, with a notable decline following a series of changes at platforms like Google, Facebook, and X/Twitter, which once served as reliable sources for new visitors. The growing use of AI and the continued rise of platforms that deprioritize referral traffic, such as TikTok and Instagram, present even greater challenges for publishers.
To attract new readers at a high volume, you’ll need to find them in places where they congregate at scale outside of these platforms. This includes:
- Attracting new readers through news aggregators. News aggregators integrated into the device and apps like Apple News, Google News, and Flipboard can help you find readers before they open search and social platforms. Remember: you’ll always be more successful working with a platform that’s incentivized to help you grow.
- Buying traffic. This can be tough when budgets are tight, but it is still a key strategy for many publishers and the right partner can ensure the practice is a profitable audience development lever.
- Insights. High-quality content is the best way to attract new readers. To best improve your content strategy, you need actionable insights to determine what those readers consider quality reporting.
Our products support publishers in each category. Taboola News offers our news partners exclusive access to audiences on Samsung, Motorola, Xiaomi and other leading mobile devices on device lock screens and wallpaper. Taboola Ads, the largest native ad platform of its kind worldwide, allows publishers to reach engaged audiences via traffic acquisition campaigns from our network of over 1.3B monthly unique users across 9,000 publisher sites. Taboola Newsroom lets our partners access insights from our massive data set of over 500 million daily active users so they can make informed decisions about growing and engaging audiences.
Step 2: Keep readers on-site
People don’t stay on a news site that makes them hunt for something that interests them. A recent Reuters Institute report found that 38% of people avoid the news, and 29% do so because there is overwhelming information to sift through.
They want you to do the work for them and make a recommendation based on their needs—just like search and social sites have done. Here’s how:
- Build your site with personalization in mind. You should be recirculating content without causing echo chambers, so every page is custom-built for the person reading it.
- Use tools that give users another chance to engage before they leave. You can direct traffic to a page that recommends more content before they click back to the originating app.
- Scale personalization with data beyond your site. Power this personalization from insights about what content works for your readers and your competitor’s readers.
For You is a Taboola technology that powers a personalized reader experience for our partner’s audiences. Whether someone visits a homepage, section front, or article, the content recommendations come from insights based on reader behavior from the entirety of Taboola’s network. We were also inspired by common native app experiences to build Explore More, a feature that offers recommendations to readers woh find sites through external apps.
Step 3: Get readers to come back again
One of the biggest determining factors in whether a reader is engaged is how often they visit your site. Once you’ve captured new readers, you want to attract them back to your site as often as possible. Here’s how:
- Send push notifications to readers who love them. Many readers love push notifications and rely on them to stay informed. Send them to the right people.
- Personalize content inside push notifications and on-site. Personalize push notifications with content and headlines that resonate with each subscriber.
- Power your re-engagement strategy with data across our network. Don’t rely on push notification data alone. Generate insights from your site and your competitors’ sites.
Taboola Push serves custom push notifications to readers based on activity across 9,000+ partners. Our partners can send personalized updates to readers who want them based on our entire network.
Modern newsrooms require a new strategy
Today’s internet requires different tactics to attract, keep, and re-engage readers. Publishers need to seek audiences in new spaces and engage them the way they expect to be engaged.
Our publisher partners have been dramatically increasing traffic and engagement with tactics that include push notifications, news aggregators, ads, and personalization.
We’ve also recently launched Taboola for Audience, a new AI-powered technology that empowers publishers to drive significantly more traffic, which is more critical now than ever.
But we’ve just scratched the surface today. The next three articles in the series will discuss these tactics in detail.
Contact a member of the Taboola team to see how we can help grow and engage your audience this year.