So, to better determine whether publishers themselves were seeing these patterns, I spoke with the heads of audience at The Guardian, The New York Times, Bloomberg Media, and The Wall Street Journal.
I asked them if push notifications and peer-to-peer sharing had increased as sources of traffic, and whether any product innovations or strategic changes had led to these upticks.
As is common in these kinds of situations, the audience operators were reluctant to share specific figures. Two of them even asked if their competitors had shared audience numbers, in an attempt to conduct a little lighthearted corporate espionage.
Regardless, the audience leads at each publisher confirmed that both sources of traffic had increased.
Understandably, the publishers had placed much more emphasis on improving their push notification strategy than peer-to-peer sharing efforts.
For the latter, while publishers can track what gets shared, they have little more than that historical data and their news instinct to try and predict what will get shared, making it a challenging metric to optimize. Product enhancements surrounding sharing, such as making it simpler or providing gift links, have been integral to this process, but ultimately sharing is primarily a byproduct of compelling editorial.
