80 /20 Rule Applies to Growing Content Page Views

Increasing content page views for a site depends on a handful of popular articles.

The great majority of views will take place among a great minority of pages. As a result, visitors state clearly they prefer quality over quantity.

Many experiments have proven that a top-performing website doesn’t always need the most content. It simply needs great content that appeals to the largest number of visitors. Quality is a priority; quantity is a plus.

They in turn add to the popularity of those pages by sharing them on social media accounts.

In fact, quality is a measure of both the article and the packaging. Packaging enhances the content of the article with attractive photos, graphics, polls, videos and other ways of adding engagement.

Engagement Drives Page Views

A 1,500 word article with no photos or other methods of increasing visual appeal cannot engage visitors as much as a similar article with graphic appeal.

Even well-placed ads create more engagement. The proof of that statement lies with the fact that articles which wrap around ads have higher click rates on those ads.

Site publishers who build galleries, sidebars, related links and other material and package them with an important story will see far greater payback on the effort than simply pushing out as many articles as possible without the related content.

Content Production Tiers

Think of content production as a process with tiers and priorities.

The top tier stories go first and get the most attention and packaging. The middle tier stories go second and may or may not get extra help. The bottom tier stories get no extra attention and may not even be published at all.

The top tier is 20 percent of all content. It produces the most content page views. The remaining 80 percent belong to the second and third tiers.

Quantity is a factor in prioritizing content. That 1,500-word article is more important than a 50-word article in the eyes of the search engines. They automatically assume that the article is authoritative and informative.

Assuming that it is worth 1,500 words and not simply bloated, the writer and editor should automatically dedicate the most time and effort to building engagement.

That 50-word brief is not likely to get any rankings in search engines, so the extra work isn’t usually worth it.

Speed Versus Quality

The process of growing content page views in media — especially news media — is a mix of speed and quality.

The news writers, editors and producers have to work fast to make deadlines. In non-news environments, the content generators need to work at a reasonable speed for the sake of building and maintaining a profitable business. Taking forever is not an option.

In both environments, the producers must sacrifice at least some speed for quality. Among media sites, speed is a major priority when a breaking story has enormous readership potential, such as a mass shooting. Even then, a minimal level of quality is necessary.

In those cases, everyone is looking for every piece of information they can find now and will judge a media outlet accordingly. But speed is not a meaningful factor in 99 percent of all other stories.

At the end of the day, it’s all about good judgment and common sense.