When you’re the Editor of a news website, one of the things you find yourself doing is keeping an eye on what the most popular content published by your competitors is. For example, The Journal has a “view count” on its site, allowing you to see approximately how many people are reading each story. The Irish Times has it’s “most read” section, ranking its stories by readership that day. Social media is also a good guide – hot content gets clicked and shared.
But the relationship is not linear: Sometimes, content can be popular without being widely shared, and sometimes content can be shared widely without being very popular. This is because what people are reading is not always the same thing as what people would like you to think they are reading.
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