It’s (a little bit) in the headlines

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Huffington Post occupies a unique spot in the online media market, thanks to its ability to combine original reported and opinion pieces presented from a left-leaning perspective on diverse topics ranging from “Politics,” to “Business,” to “Green,” to “Tech,” and so on and so forth.  But increasingly thought of as the left’s counterpart to the Drudge Report, HuffPo’s success also seems to lie in the perfection of a basic attention-grabbing technique:The crafting of the ideal headline—a process, it turns out, that has been aided by some pretty clever efforts being undertaken by those running the site.  Per the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University:

The Huffington Post applies A/B testing to some of its headlines. Readers are randomly shown one of two headlines for the same story. After five minutes, which is enough time for such a high-traffic site, the version with the most clicks becomes the wood that everyone sees… the system was created inhouse… Huffington Post editors have found that placing the author’s name above a headline almost always leads to more clicks than omitting it.

Though it’s unrelated to this A/B testing, The Huffington Post’s new social media editor, Josh Young, has also been soliciting better headlines from readers on Twitter. That’s not as awesomely scientific, but it’s a pretty good use of the crowd.

Pretty smart, huh?  HuffPo’s CTO won’t say how often the A/B testing is done, but with more than 8.3 million unique visitors a month according to Compete.com, you know that no matter how much or how little they’re doing it, it’s working.