The Web As You Know It Is Over

Matthew Knell, VP of Social Media, about.com@matthewknell

(and What You Can Do About It)

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• 85 million people visit about.comevery month

• 13th largest site on the Internet

• 1,000 Experts on topics from parenting to technology, healthcare and cooking.

• Each month more people check out About.com than Pandora, Twitter, Buzzfeed, Linkedin or Netflix.

Sources: ComScore, about.com internal metrics

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4Reasons

WhyThe Web

You Know Is Over

Reason #1Mobile is finally

the primary platform

Photo: Osborne Luggable from http://www.oldcomputers.net/osborne.html#orlandoix15

Mobile has won

People spend more consuming media on their mobiles than their desktop or laptop and have for the

last two years.

Taken from, and I highly recommend you read Mary Meeker’s seminal Internet Trends Report: http://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/internet-trends-v1#orlandoix15

In 2015, mobiles and tablet visitors have accounted for

more page views than desktop visitors.

Source: about.com internal stats, 2015#orlandoix15

Reason #2Search isn’t as

dominant anymore

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Facebook can drive more traffic then GoogleMedia sites got more traffic from Facebook than Google in July 2015

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Major publishers

Source: SimilarWeb, Jul-Sep 2015

Site Social SearchRefinery29 38% 24%

HuffingtonPost 22% 36%

BuzzFeed 51% 13%

Mashable 43% 24%

Quartz 40% 22%

NY Times 20% 23%

WSJ 13% 33%

CNN 11% 20%

Fox News 9% 21%

Mother Jones 48% 18%

Gawker 13% 18%#orlandoix15

Pinterest = emerging as the

new searchPinterest is fast becoming a search engine for people’s passions and desires.

It’s a new “human edited” search engine.

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social visitors are

24%more engaged thansearch visitors

Source: about.com internal stats, Jan-Aug 2015#orlandoix15

more engaged than the average social user

Pinterest visitors are

108%

Reason #3The line

between media and distribution

is blurring

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Traffic increasingly lives in closed systemsRequires content creators to understand and play platform rules and create content in more places.

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Hybrid hosting

• Facebook hopes “Instant Articles” will make content load faster for users by hosting third-party content on their servers.

• Washington Post has committed to publishing 100% of their content this way.

• Google and Twitter are working on their own versions.

More about Instant Articles: http://instantarticles.fb.com

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Apple News• Personalized content on your iOS

device.

• New with iOS 9.

• Allows for more elegantly designed content.

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Fully distributed content networks

• NowThis doesn’t have a website, living entirely on social.

• BuzzFeed BFF is a fully distributed network as well.

• Huffington Post is moving this way too.

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Reason #4Private is the new Public

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Source: We Are Social’s Digital, Social and Mobile in 2015 report: http://www.slideshare.net/wearesocialsg/digital-social-mobile-in-2015

Chat apps

• 4 of the 6 top social networks worldwide are chat / messenging applications.

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Chat popular amongst all demos

Among smartphone owners 18-29, 49% use messaging apps. But 37% of 30-49 and 24% of 50+ do too.

#orlandoix15 Source: Pew Internet: http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/08/19/mobile-messaging-and-social-media-2015-main-findings/

Snapchat risingExplosive growth in Snapchat in the last two years suggests that more millennials are keeping it “in the network”.

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3Things

You Can Do About It

Thing #1Offer share

tools smartly

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Limit Share Options

Review the quality and quantity of traffic from social sources.

Only highlight in share buttons the ones you want traffic from.

It’s ok to limit choices.

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Consider Chat Apps For Sharing

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USA Today’s FTW saw 3-4x the number of shares to What’s App over Twitter on Mobile

Source: Digiday http://digiday.com/publishers/usa-todays-win-ditched-twitter-buttons-mobile/

Thing #2Optimize your metadata for mobile and

social

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Open Graph Tags

• Allow you to specify exactly how a Facebook share looks with code on the page.

• Author tags let you specify a Facebook profile or page to associate with a writer to help grow their social audience.

Photo

TitleDescriptionAuthor Tags

More about Open Graph: http://ogp.me

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Pinterest Rich Pins

• Most Open Graph Tags work with Rich Pins too -little additional work required

• Allows you to customize metadata about pins

• Helps pages show up in Pinterest search

• Come in App, Product, Article, Place, Movie, Recipe Pins

Photo

Title

More about Rich Pins: https://business.pinterest.com/en/rich-pins

Rich Pin in Search Pin Detail Page

DescriptionSite Name

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Source: about.com internal stats#orlandoix15

in a single week

After enabling Rich Pins,page views from

Pinterest increased

40%

Thing #3

Make sure your content can

work anywhere

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Consider adding a second “social friendly” title to your content.

Output the second social title in your Open Graph tags to show only in shares.

Social Titles

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Social Titles

Consider using those social titles on related links and mobile pages too

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Micro content

Content gives, screens don’t

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Remember emerging formatsAmazon Echo

Apple TVSamsung Gear VR

Keep your RSS Feeds fresh

Yes, RSS Feeds still matter.

As new content distribution systems grow, make sure you still have update RSS feeds for your content for other uses.

Consider building APIs to allow qualified apps to use your content too.

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Questions?@matthewknell

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