Why I love the NY Times’ Most Popular list
– posted August 16th, 2006 by Brian Donohue Comments (3)
Since the New York Times redesigned their website a few months ago, it’s received quite a lot of attention for a variety of design innovations they’ve introduced. As a daily user of the site, there’s one feature that I’ve found surprisingly useful — the most emailed list.
What’s so great great about it? Well, I initially thought the designers were silly to use the most emailed articles instead of the most viewed articles. But actually, that’s the beauty of it. I bet their most viewed articles are just the top headlines of the day, and who needs help finding those?
The value of the most-emailed classification is that most people only email articles that they find really interesting, that are a bit off the beaten path, or that offer some unusual angle on, well, life.
This morning was a good example of that. At the top of the list was an article about coffee actually being good for you. That’s great news! And I had missed that article yesterday. The next article is about some crazy Russian guy who solved an unsolvable math problem and then went AWOL. Also interesting.
And there was an article from way back in June, about how a wife subtly got her husband to change by applying techniques from exotic animal trainers. Sounds silly, but it’s really interesting stuff — though it’s hardly news. This article stayed on the most emailed list for ages, and it’s still in the most emailed list for the month.
The other lists are boring
When I first saw their user-generated-content widget, I thought the “Blogged” tab was the most interesting.
You know, that paragon of journalism acknoledging the importance and relevance of blogs. But you know what? I never bother looking at the Most Blogged list. It tends to focus on the political articles or the “issue” articles, and frankly I’m not too fussed about missing those. Here’s what’s on the list today:
And the most searches list is a total waste of space. I don’t care what other people are looking for on the site.
The value of the most emailed list is that is enables all the other NY Times readers to serve as an editor, helping to identify the really good bits that you don’t want to miss.
In other words, it’s like Digg for just the NY Times.
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Categories Design
3 comments so far
1. Paul Adams on Aug 17th, 2006 - 15:13
“I bet their most viewed articles are just the top headlines of the day, and who needs help finding those?”
This functionality is not so much about findability as it is about the relative value of content.
‘Most viewed’ doesn’t tell you very much. You don’t know what was going on in the reader’s head when they viewed the page. Maybe they thought the article was good. Maybe they thought the article was terrible. Maybe it wasn’t at all what they were looking for.
Someone looked at something - but what does that mean? Did they find the content they were looking for? Or maybe they didn’t look at it at all; maybe it was part of their journey to find something else.
‘Most emailed’ is a much more valuable measure. Not only is it a recommendation of content, the reader has valued it so much that they have sent it to people whose opinion they care about. It is ultimately a reflection of themselves. It is a very powerful insight. It is an extension of the market research technique of asking someone if they would ‘recommend this to a friend’.
BBC.co.uk has similar functionality. But it often reflects the news as much as more serendipitous content.
‘Most emailed’ is also a direct insight into popular culture. Hence the popularity of content related to Big Brother and smoking bans. But it is only an insight into the 10% of an audience who interact with content.
‘Most blogged’ as similar intrinsic value to ‘Most emailed’. But blogging is not a mainstream (society) activity.
‘Most searched’ doesn’t tell you much. It could tell you as much about NY Times bad navigation as it does about popular content. We simply don’t know because we weren’t there observing the reader who searched.
2. Paul Adams on Aug 17th, 2006 - 21:24
link to BBC most popular:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared.....ml/map.stm
3. » Blogs are one of the best SEO tools available - iQ Blog on Jul 11th, 2008 - 10:31
[...] blogs that attract the search engines is unique and human-readable URLs (web address). For example, Brian’s recent post on the NY Times’ Most Popular List ends with /why-i-love-the-ny-times-most-popular-list which to search engines and indeed, humans, is [...]
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