The 'secret order' of saleable content
Sir. We need to put more Ferraris on our magazine covers.
Editor: Why Raja?
More automobile enthusiasts will buy our magazine if we feature more supercars and superbikes on the cover and write extensively about them.
Editor: Why do you think that will increase our sales?
Our magazine’s target audience is automobile enthusiasts. All auto enthusiasts love supercars and superbikes. They like to collect pictures and special wrappers. The more we publish them, the more our circulation grows.
Editor: No Raja, These are not saleable articles. How can we grow the circulation if our stories are not saleable?
Then, What is a saleable article?
Editor: Simple, Raja. An article that sells. From a print magazine perspective, we need to have more articles that are saleable.
As an automobile enthusiast working in an automobile magazine, I stood there in disappointment.
A few months later, during a review with our chief editor, a similar conversation popped up.
He reiterated that we should feature more human stories on the covers. Even though it’s an automobile magazine, it’s the joy of driving or owning an automobile that readers relate to. He wanted us to showcase that emotion more on the covers. And we did.
Did it work well? I don’t know.
This happened in 2013. A few months later, I got access to Universal Analytics and our website.
Last week, I realized that for more than 10 years, one of the first things I see every day after waking up is the daily report on which stories did well the previous day. This habit continued from the automobile magazine (Motor Vikatan), the whole website (Vikatan), the apps (Tamil Flash News, APPAPPO pay-per-article app), and now the Frontline Magazine.
And I also realized, I was never able to conclusively define the term ‘saleable article’. Why is that?
A well-instrumented analytics tool is like the James Webb Telescope. Some days, you take a peek at the local solar system and think, ‘This is it, this is why this planet is behaving in a certain way!’ Some days, you go ‘deep field’, and observe far away galaxies.
The same applies to analytics. The more you drill down, the more you feel like you have found enough evidence why an article is performing (or not performing) well. But the truth is, you also perceive that it’s still an enigma. The reason is, you can never find out why someone consciously chose to read a piece of content. At this point, we are granular. You sense a disorder. But when you zoom out, you’ll sense a ‘realm’ of absolute order.
‘In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.’ - Carl Jung
So, what’s the secret order when it comes to ‘saleable’ content? Is there any formula for creating ‘saleable’ content? If a story ticks off a ‘checklist’, does it become ‘saleable’?
The only thing I can confidently say is ‘saleable by relevance’.
It’s the only common factor of all the best-selling content I’ve seen in print magazines, digital websites, short news products, and pay-per-articles.
Thus, any piece of content also becomes a ‘Schrödinger's cat’ the moment it gets published. Until you open the box and observe, the cat is in a superposition. It could be both alive and dead. Once a story is published, the moment you go ‘deep field’ to observe how an article is performing, is also the moment you assume the relevance of the article. Some readers find the story relevant, some swipe it away thinking it’s rubbish.
AI Generated with Microsoft Designer. A stylized representation of Schrödinger's cat in a box, but instead of a cat, have a newspaper or magazine inside. This could be partially visible, playing on the idea of content existing in a state of potential relevance.
Any story’s performance can be studied based on many factors or parameters. For example, source, platform, user persona, user phase, location, demographics… even the emotional state or trait of the user.
Is this story doing well because it is relevant to readers from this location? Is that story selling well because it is relevant to the age of the readers? Even though you have enough data, the questions can be infinite. In this domain, the more data you have, the more assumptions can be possible.
Why is that?
Because it’s impossible to measure why an article is relevant to the user, as we’ll never know why it mattered to that particular user. Only when you zoom out do you find users with similar patterns. But they all could be reading the story as it mattered to them for different reasons.
Every news product manager is solving for all the realms that exist above this granular point → Why a particular person found a specific story relevant at that moment in time and place.
As a news product manager, all I do is help a user understand why a story could matter to a reader.
And like Schrödinger's cat, the moment you make the measurement is the moment you decide the article’s fate.
I sometimes think… maybe the cat doesn’t want to be bothered!
Takeaway: Ultimately, the secret to saleable content lies in its relevance. Yet, just like Schrödinger's cat, this relevance exists in a state of potential until observed.
As news product managers, our challenge is to create the conditions where this potential relevance can be realized, without disturbing the delicate balance that makes content resonate with each unique reader.
P.S. – Do you think this blog is a 'saleable content'? Well, like Schrödinger's cat, it exists in a state of potential until you, the reader, decide its relevance :-).
Let me know what you think!