I'm Alexander Held, Senior Data Scientist at DER SPIEGEL, and this is the third article in a series on our audience engagement strategy. 

> In part one, we explained how we built our engagement score, a blended metric for measuring reader interaction (link to part one). 

> In part two, we showed how combining the score with surveys and interviews helped us identify our most important engagement drivers (link to part two). 

> In this article, we describe how we apply the score across our product and channels, and why a one size fits all approach to a diverse audience is inefficient for sustainable revenue growth. 

The post How DER SPIEGEL uses its engagement score: our key use cases  appeared first on Audiencers.

Regular commenting below articles has always been a frequently-used engagement feature on DER SPIEGEL. In fact, Product Manager Laura Badura shared that at the peak 1.7M comments were left in a month… too much for AI and human moderation to manage and too much for users to read . 

Not only this, but conversations on a single topic were happening in multiple places across the site, diluting the potential value of this feature. Debates on the US elections for instance took place in the comments section of several articles covering the topic a day. 

So, when the time came to review the feature and evaluate tools used, Laura and the DER SPIEGEL product team decided to run some user research to understand the popularity of comment sections, why users turned to DER SPIEGEL for debating instead of X or Reddit, and find ways of improving the feature.

> DER SPIEGEL peaked at 1.7 million comments a month, beyond what moderation could handle or readers could read, with the same argument scattered across several articles a day

> Research found only 5% comment regularly, and that non-participants, women especially, wanted a safe space. So dislikes were dropped and real names were not required, though accounts are verified

> The Times went the other way, moving real-name commenting from 37% to 98%. Toxicity fell, attacks on writers dropped 25%, and comment volume rose. Two credible publishers, opposite conclusions

> Reading a debate needs only a free account. Commenting, reacting, seeing the vote split before it closes and proposing topics are all subscriber-only, so participation itself is the paid product

> Ten thousand people logged in within seven hours of launch. The first year brought 900 debates, three million votes and 400,000 comments, with the comment acceptance rate rising slightly

A lot of research later… 

The post Going further with interactive engagement: introducing the debating feature appeared first on Audiencers.

This article was co-authored by Alexander Held,  Senior Data Scientist, and Angelika Zajac, qualitative researcher in the audience research department, at DER SPIEGEL. 

The post Audience Research: identifying Key Engagement Drivers at DER SPIEGEL appeared first on Audiencers.

By focusing on delivering a meaningful and relevant experience to our readers, DER SPIEGEL has built a loyal and engaged community of subscribers who actively seek out our brand and value the content we provide. We are successful in acquiring new subscribers, yet we are facing a significant challenge in maintaining the retention of these readers. Some of our subscribers stop engaging with our content, leading to churn. This article dives into how we measure audience engagement and its impact on key business metrics.

Audience engagement metrics

The post How we measure audience engagement at DER SPIEGEL appeared first on Audiencers.