Huffington Post Crowdsources Headlines in 5mins
When you hear about Crowdsoucing you think about Wikipedia, Youtube, Myspace and other social media.
The Huffington Post uses crowdsourcing to test two versions of a headline.
It’s a process called A/B testing, which is often used in Direct Marketing and Google Adwords: Two alternative versions of an ad and see which one works better. With Google adwords it can be something as small as a period or a capital letter.
Writers know that headlines or titles are everything. They spark people interest and make them want to know more. Online, where reader clicks are the lifeblood of the business, this sensitivity is even more important: Which is why Huffington Post’s use of live crowd-sourced A/B testing is clever.
The Huffington Post system is automated, and applied to many of the headlines on the site. Writers and editors put together two alternate versions of the headline text, and slot it into the code. For five minutes, visitors to the site get to see either one or the other version of the headline at random, embedded among the others on the front page. The best part is when the five minutes is up, the code works out which headline has garnered the most clicks to the full article–a perfect measure of the headline’s pull, when traffic is high enough–and then the final headline is fixed. It’s almost a self-optimizing system, with a successful headline basically selecting itself. It’s also a neat way around one of those odd side-effects of writing: Sometimes an article just takes off in popularity unexpectedly, perhaps because its headline taps into the public’s consciousness at that particular moment.
viaTECH WEEKLY
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