Organised by German press agency dpa and consultancy firm Highberg, the DRIVE (Digital Revenue Initiative) project was launched in 2020 and now includes 30 publishers from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The cohort tackles initiatives, delves into best practices on shared problems, and learns from data and insights.

One such example is a recent focus on “ghost articles.” 

In Germany, 80% of articles fell into the “ghost article” state at the beginning of the analysis, said Hendrik Langen, managing partner at Highberg. 

What does that mean? In total, an article received less than five hours of media time — or reading time — from all visits to the article. If the average reading time is one minute, that would translate into 300 visitors reading the article for one minute. 

That metric was chosen as the baseline, assuming the average article takes five hours to report and write, Langen said. So if an article gets less reading time than it takes to produce, it’s considered a “ghost article.”

“Our core metric shows 80% of the content is worthless in terms of engagement and media time,” Langen said. “If you put more time into writing an article than people are reading the article, then something is wrong.”

It could be the topic, he said. Or, it may be the distribution and the promotion of the article, said Ole Fehling, manager/data science at Highberg. 

“This is also about improving the distribution and personalisation of content distribution,” Fehling said. “It’s also important to look at this from an ongoing basis. Audience interests shift, and this is a very usable metric.”

Two of the German publishers that analysed “ghost articles” moved from 70% in that category at the outset to 30% now, Fehling said.

“Reducing ‘ghost articles’ saves resources,” Langen said. “You have to do this to have free time to do other things and have a growth mindset. Really, the first key thing in the initiative is awareness.”

Part of looking at “ghost articles” is understanding user needs (which I wrote about here), Fehling said. For instance, the topic of living performs well for “divert me.”

“Helping to introduce user needs to newsrooms is not just one formula,” Langen said. “It’s a very individual mixture of user needs. Planning the right formula is important.”

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