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Yuccie succulents pabst next level humblebrag PBR&B, semiotics 8-bit big mood prism pug stumptown narwhal gochujang. Fam tousled forage hashtag gochujang sriracha irony keffiyeh live-edge leggings jean shorts tacos. Chartreuse gastropub mustache hammock forage, coloring book paleo gatekeep. You probably haven’t heard of them fanny pack disrupt aesthetic locavore man braid coloring book readymade. Raclette vice pop-up same literally fanny pack cred meditation prism tote bag pok pok fashion axe ascot trust fund. Aesthetic listicle pour-over copper mug dreamcatcher migas readymade JOMO man braid knausgaard locavore.

The post Some testing appeared first on Context.

Search and social are good ways for people to find you, but how about having a way to PUSH stories to the right readers without annoying them or invading their privacy?

Contextly makes that possible with Channels.

Channels lets readers subscribe to follow topics on your site and get notified when you publish more about that topic.

So if you post a Daily Deal or a new post about Knitting, readers that subscribed to those topics will get an email letting them now about the new story.

And, what’s even better: you and your editorial team don’t have to do *anything* differently. There’s literally zero extra editorial work. Just write and tag your stories as usual, and we’ll do the rest of it.

Here’a an example email notification from Cult of Mac to readers that subscribe to its How-To channel:

A couple things to note here:

1. The email looks like it comes from your site, but we send it for you
2. Your logo is up there
3. We notify the reader about new posts about the topic AND fill out the email with other suggestions from your site

Channels are now included in your base Contextly fee. Yup, no extra charges.

To get readers to sign-up, you can either use our inline form (see example below) or a subscription button that shows up in relevant posts on your site.

This is an example of the Contextly Channel subscription sign-up form on mobile.

We use your Categories and Tags to categorize posts, and you have control over which ones readers can subscribe to. Additionally, you have lots of easy-to-use controls on what the sign-up prompt looks like, where it is placed and what the notifications look like.

We’ll send you separate reports on how the Channels are doing, including which ones are popular, how many folks signed up, how many notifications we sent out, and how many we think were opened (an imprecise measurement, because not all email clients let us know when an email is opened).

As for privacy, we don’t spam or otherwise annoy these readers. We only email these folks to tell them about your new stories. If they want fewer notifications, they can choose that via a link at the bottom of the notification email, just above the unsubscribe link.

We hope you love building a direct distribution channel to your most loyal readers.

The post Favorite Feature #17: Let Readers Follow Topics on Your Site (Channels!) appeared first on Context.

To make our reports even more useful, we’ve expanded our reports to include information on home pages, tag/category pages and about where your traffic is coming from (referral reports). We’ve even given the service a name: Contextly Analytics.

Starting with version 6.0.2, Contextly will collect data on homepage visits and to visits to tag and category pages. We don’t show recommendations on these pages, so these aren’t counted in our calculations of CTRs.

They are, however, included in the summary,

And, in a longer breakdown,

We also now record referrers to your site, and break those into buckets. This lets you see how many people come to your site via social media channels like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as with Search (e.g. Bing, Google, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo).

We also keep track of Internal referrers, which is views that come from links on your own site.

We also break out top pages per source, so you can see what’s doing well on Facebook and what’s doing well in search.

We hope these easy-to-use reports help you better plan your editorial strategy and plan to build on them soon to make them even more useful.

One thing to note: measuring web traffic is more art than science. Our numbers will be different than other analytics such as Google Analytics. That’s because each service filters out bots differently; counts partial page-loads differently; and get blocked by user browsers’ differently.

But our numbers will be directionally correct, and our analytics are intended to help you understand what’s going on with your site and what content is resonating with readers. Our Contextly Analytics are meant to help with your editorial strategy.

Remember, you can add as many people in your organization as you like to the list of those that get the emailed reports, and for those of you who don’t need all the reports, you can turn off daily, weekly, or monthly reports – just look at the end of any report sent to you for unsubscribe options.

Finally, as a note on privacy, Contextly’s service does not rely on cookies either for recommendations or our analytics (though our CDN does use a necessary and permitted session cookie to prevent malicious attacks). We remain fully compliant with both the GDPR and CCPA as we don’t track readers of your site.

The post Favorite Feature #16: Reports on Referrer Sites and Homepages appeared first on Context.

Contextly recently introduced powerful tools to let sites make related post and popular recommendations on their sites more customizable to their needs.

There’s now 3 main ways to filter recommendations:

1. By Post Date
2. By Categories or Tags
3. Blacklisting single urls or word/phrase

By Post Date: Contextly now lets you limit how far back our recommendations go. So for instance, if you have 10 years worth of posts, you might want to only show readers recommendations from the last three years.

You can now set a Global Default that limits this.

Older posts will still show recommendations, but the older posts don’t show up in recommendations.

But we also realized two things:

A) You should be able to override the Global Default for certain content so that older posts like How-Tos still show up.

So we made it possible for you to do that.

And B) that some content is better with a very short-time limit. So we made it possible for you to limit those even more than the Global Default. For instance, you might have a category called Deal of the Week and links to older deals aren’t great because they’ve expired.

So in that case, you can set that category to 7 days, while the Global Default is 3 years.

See below how the Global Default is 2 years, while posts tagged Fashion got set to 6 months and posts in the Cars category are set to 1 year.

By Tags and Categories:

If there are particular tags or categories you simply don’t want included in related post recommendations or even in your popular posts or evergreen post recommendations, you can exclude these posts from the recommendations.

For example, you might have a tag for corrections or for internal announcements.

Simply choose which ones you would like to exclude under the Content Settings tab and the option “Filter by Tag/Category”.

Here posts tagged Advertisement are excluded as are posts in the Categories “Expired” and “Uncategorized.”

By Url or Keyword:

You may have very particular content that you don’t want surfacing in recommendations. If you want to exclude a post from recommendations, simply copy and paste the url into the exclusion box.

For instance, you might have an older post that’s clickbaity or just not your best work. This lets you keep it out of the related posts and out of the popular and evergreen recommendations. However, posts that are excluded from the recommendations will still have recommendations on them (this is a feature, not a bug).

You can also filter related posts based on keywords. So, for instance, if you wanted to filter out posts with the words “car accident” or “NSFW”, you can do that as well.

You can find both of these filter tools under Content Settings -> “Filter by URL/word”.

As always, if you have feedback or other needs, just drop us a note at info@contextly.com

The post Favorite Feature #15: Filter Related Posts by Date, Categories and Tags appeared first on Context.

We’ve found that being the best related links plugin for WordPress has helped us win high-quality publishers of all kinds as clients – from brands to tech media. (We’re not just WordPress, of course, we also have a supported Drupal related links plugin and have an API version that works with nearly any publishing system.)

Ultimately, Ryan said Contextly’s value proposition varies based on the type of publications it serves. “The one thing we’ve found is that people publish for so many different reasons,” Ryan said.

 

For customers like Stitch Fix, an online personal styling brand, the goal is to attract as many readers as possible in hopes of converting them into loyal paid subscribers. Cult of Mac, on the other hand, is focused on building its readership base and increasing credibility.

 

“Everything we do in terms of our recommendations goes back to that publisher’s own content,” he said. “For some publishers, we do that cross-publication if they have sister sites, but our focus is typically on smaller sites and niche sites that value maintaining trusted relationships with their readers.”

Full profile of Contextly.

The post A profile of Contextly’s “powerful content recommendation system” appeared first on Context.

That change broke several of Contextly’s editorial tools, including the ability to add sidebars into the body of stories. (A style note: we call in-post recommendation blocks Sidebars, and recommendations that show up on either side of the post Siderails. This is how the news industry refers to these units, even though WordPress, inaccurately, calls units to the left or right of a post “Sidebars”.)

For example, Manual Sidebars are added via the Classic Editor using WordPress shortcodes in the text of the post. Those sidebars can be edited, but not previewed, in the Classic Editor.

Due to how Gutenberg blocks work, this shortcode insertion method doesn’t work with Gutenberg. So we built a new method for adding sidebars in Gutenberg.

Starting with v. 5.0.4, you can now editorially add Sidebars to posts if you are using Gutenberg or the Classic editor. You can add either Auto-Sidebars (where the content is chosen algorithmically and changes over time) or Manual Sidebars where you choose the content (static recommendations).

As a note, Auto-Sidebars that automatically get added to *every* post are *not* affected by the Gutenberg update. And if you haven’t tried these Automatic Auto-Sidebars yet, we highly recommend them.

Sidebars inserted via the Gutenberg editor are defined as a new kind of block in WP (found under Widgets), and if you use them a couple of times, they’ll show up in the “most used” section when you start a new block.

Additionally, you can now actually see the contents of the sidebar in the editing interface, which we think is a nice change and editing them is far more intuitive now.

For those of you who haven’t switched over to the Gutenberg editor or who have decided to keep the older editing interface (hopefully using the WP Classic Editor plugin ) — worry not, the original method of adding sidebars and links still works.

*** THE NITTY GRITTY ***

How do I create a sidebar in Gutenberg?

When you create a new block by pressing the plus sign, scroll to Widgets and choose either Contextly Auto-Sidebar or Contextly Manual Sidebar.

If you choose the Auto-Sidebar, this will be automatically filled by our algorithms, with the kind and number of recommendations determined by your choice in the control panel. You can still edit this sidebar to choose one or more posts.

So for instance, if your Auto-Sidebars are set to show 3 related recommendations, and you choose one post, the sidebar will show 3 recommendations: the one you chose plus 2 related recommendations that can change over time.

If you choose the Manual Sidebar, you need to click Edit to choose posts. Your choices will be the only recommendations shown in that Sidebar.

Once you’ve created a new Sidebar in Gutenberg it’ll show up in your commonly used Blocks and be even easier to get to.

How do I edit a Sidebar?

Simply open the post in the Gutenberg editor and click the edit button in the block holding the Sidebar you want to edit. Then make your change and press save.

How do I re-use an existing Sidebar?

Create a new Sidebar. Press Edit. Look for the Sidebar Library link, and then choose the Sidebar you’d like to replicate. This creates a copy of the sidebar so any changes you make to it only apply to the copy.

What if I simply want Auto-Sidebars to show up in *every* post without doing any editorial work?

I thought you’d never ask. Go to the Contextly control panel. Settings->Contextly->Big Settings Button. Then choose Modules->Auto-Sidebar and click the button “Insert an Auto-Sidebar in every post” and make sure the setting for “Enable Auto-Placement” is ticked.

Set the parameters for placement and then press save. Every post that matches those parameters will have an Auto-Sidebar. This makes no changes to your posts and you can turn this off at any time.

What about the Single Link button in Gutenberg?

We didn’t mess with the core new Gutenberg editor so we didn’t remake this button, which makes it simple to link back to previous posts or to content on the web. If it’s something you want back, let us know and we’ll look into it.

If you want to learn more about how Contextly helps turn a drive-by or occasional reader into a loyalist, drop us a note at info@contextly.com. If you publish using WordPress can also just try us out for free, no credit card needed, just search for or download Contextly’s related posts plugin. If you aren’t on WordPress, drop us a note to learn how to use our system.

The post GutenSidebar! Contextly’s Sidebars Now Work with the Gutenberg Editor appeared first on Context.

I was frustrated then at the state of digital publishing tools and the lack of innovation in the news media generally.

I still am.

After all, one of the benefits of digital publishing over paper publishing is the ability of readers to find stories that aren’t that day’s stories.

We found that readers *really* respond to smart related recommendations pointing them into a publisher’s archives. Readers are curious.

But one of the things we realized is that not all readers are in deep dive mode.

Readers show up to a news story with a range of motivations. Sometimes a reader getting to the end of a story is done with the topic.

The paper analog of this is turning the pages in a magazine or jumping to a different section of the paper.

So we expanded our recommendations to include an Explore section, which let readers find other new content and also surface evergreen content. (We define “evergreen” as an story that’s older than 3 weeks that’s still giving value to readers, which we can algorithmically determine based on audience behavior). We’ll also put in personalized recommendations for return readers.

This gives a far better recommendation mix than common, naive strategies like the top 5 most popular stories or the five most recent stories.

The goal then is to create pathways for readers with varying goals; from killing time to diving deeply into a specific topic.

We then tackled an even harder problem: following a story. It’s a common thing for readers to do, as evidenced by the common question: “Have you been following the story about Samsung Note 7 batteries/water poisoning in Flint/the Warriors/etc?”.

Those who subscribe to a daily newspaper are much more likely to be able to stay abreast of ongoing stories fairly passively, but one of the things that digital news (and machine learning) makes possible is letting readers expressly say they want to follow a story and then have that sent to them.

So we built the FollowUp button, which goes on every story on a publisher’s site. Readers can subscribe to follow a story, and, if we know it, we’ll send the reader an algorithmic timeline of that story from that site. Then when we detect relevant FollowUps (without using tags or categories!), we’ll notify the reader.

This is very different from being presented with a menu to choose a category like politics, and the results have been quite encouraging. In short, readers don’t just follow big national news stories, they follow stories about their local community (controversial planning decisions or local crime) or about their interests (high school lacrosse).

We used this same thinking to drive development of other features, as well.

We’re not alone, of course. The Washington Post has done a great job since the purchase of the paper by Jeff Bezos of designing “reader-first,” which was one of his explicit goals in 2013

Smart news design serves audience interests, like not missing the next story on the California drought, while building new digital experiences to fulfill those needs, like the FollowUp button does.

This also happens to cater to publisher’s interests — getting reader’s email addresses, having a new direct distribution method and getting readers to come back.

That approach is the opposite of all-too-common dark patterns like pop-ups that obscure stories as readers read them, unneeded page jumps, stats-juking photo galleries, ad units disguised as recommendation units, or infinite scroll sites attempting to mimic the Facebook feed, with none of the grace or algorithms.

Those design choices aren’t designed to satisfy readers’ goals — and in many cases, actively and intentionally impede the reader. On some sites, the design feels like an obstacle course intended to keep readers from actually getting to the end of a story, let alone finding another story on that site.

Build for your community; not against it. Readers will reward you for it.

This post is a response to the newly resurrected Carnival of Journalism blogging challenge. The prompt for this month was: Designing for audience behavior…

The post Design for Readers, Not Against Them appeared first on Context.

Rafat Ali, founder of the B2B travel industry publication Skift. CC-licensed photo by World Travel & Tourism Council

In 2014, Rafat Ali’s Skift was in big trouble. The B2B travel industry upstart was three months away from burning through all their cash and they were unable to raise more capital.

Oh, how things have changed.

Today Skift is profitable, has double digit revenue growth, quadrupled its staff, and is on track to hit $10 million in revenue per year in the next 18 months. Perhaps what is most stunning is how this was done on only 1.5 million unique visitors a month.

How did Skift pull it off?

Ali has taken a very hard line against the vogue business models of today (see Opinions & Reactions below and The End of Scale). These business models rely on scaling traffic from intermediaries like Facebook. Playing the role of contrarian, he placed big bets on high-quality engagement and brand building instead of scale.

The pillars of his approach include:

• Owning a direct relationship with readers opposed to having that relationship mediated by intermediaries like Facebook.
• Focussing like a laser on growing its email subscriptions, which now stand a 265,000. This is what Ali calls the “central nervous system of publishing“.
• Selling research, events, and native advertising to a loyal audience built on those engagement efforts.

Contextly is proud to have participated in Skift’s unique success story.

In March 2016, Skift began using our FollowUp product. This product lets readers follow any story and notifies them when a continuation of that story has been published. Here is what Ali had to say shortly after going live with the FollowUp:

“You’ll be surprised how smart the engine behind all of this is.” -Rafat Ali

We like to think our FollowUp product is the smartest notification system in publishing today.

While many publishers struggle with the problem of sending irrelevant notifications to their readers, Contextly has built some very clever tech that delivers a targeted reader experience, essentially solving the relevance problem:

1) The reader opts to “follow a story” via email using the FollowUp button that is displayed on each story. Here is what the button looks like on Skift’s story, “Gogo’s CEO Envisions Better Wi-Fi Making Airline Passengers Happier”.

2) When available, the reader is sent an algorithmically created “Backstory” or timeline of stories that give meaningful context to their story subscription.

3) As the storyline develops over time, readers will be sent new stories as they are published.

Over the eight-month period starting in March 2016, more than 6700 readers “followed” one or more Skift stories. We have sent those readers more than 100,000 FollowUp email notifications.

More than 4500 of those readers have also subscribed to Skift’s main newsletter through our subscription process – approximately 67% of readers that followed a story also subscribed to Skift’s main newsletter. There were only 230 unsubscribes during that 8-month period, bringing the unsubscribe rate to about 0.2%.

The open rates approached 40%, which are much higher than industry averages.

But what is most important to us is that Skift and its readership are getting good value from the FollowUps.

“Contextly has created a smart way of getting stories to readers that they care about without burdening them with irrelevant information. This is a major pain point in publishing. I think Contextly has nailed it.” -Rafat Ali

“This is a feature that has grown in value for us over time,” Ali said. “As the number of FollowUps has grown, the number of notifications sent out has grown. It provides a concierge-level service to our readers, without our team having to do any additional work. It is all automated. We’ve yet to have a single reader complain about an irrelevant notification.”

“Email is a workhorse for us. It is critical for building a direct relationship with our dedicated readers. Contextly has created a smart way of getting stories to readers that they care about without burdening them with irrelevant information. This is a major pain point in publishing. I think Contextly has nailed it.”

The web is undergoing a transformation. Readers are coming to expect an experience where information will be pushed to them. Readers are in control and will shut down information streams that are annoying, irrelevant, and do not respect their time and attention. As such, publishers’ relationships with their readers will be mediated by data and algorithms. This approach will keep publishers in the good graces of their readers as well as drive engagement and revenue opportunities.

At Contextly, we believe that building a direct relationship with readers, unfettered by intermediaries, is going to be a critical path to building value and increasing revenue for publishers in the future.

If you would like to learn more, get in touch: info@contextly.com

The post Contextly Passes the 100,000 Email Mark with B2B Travel Disrupter Skift appeared first on Context.

Many publishers write stories that consistently fall into a small number of topics. Contextly Channels now make it possible for readers to subscribe to these topics without any editorial work.

What are Channels and how do they work?

1) Contextly will identify 10-20 topics that are most salient in your publication. The objective is to have over 50% of your stories fall into one of these topics. These form the basis of Channels. The Channels do not rely on your tags and categories. (You can give editorial input into this process if you like, but for the sake of efficiency, editorial involvement in selecting the topics is optional.)

2) A Channel Button is then inserted in the stories that belong to a topic.

This button allows readers to subscribe to a topic.

3) After subscribing to a Channel, a reader will be sent new stories belonging to that topic.

We have hardcoded a Channel example on our test site so you can test the reader experience yourself.

We live in a world where publishers have lost direct distribution to their readers to intermediaries like Facebook, Google, Reddit, etc. Contextly is helping smart publishers regain direct distribution to readers, and those publishers appear to be winning big.

Contextly Channels are just one way publishers can use Contextly to gain direct distribution, loyalty, and engagement with their readers. If you are interested in learning more about direct distribution to readers, check out our FollowUp Button.

If you would like to know more about Contextly’s services, get in touch: info@contextly.com

The post Contextly Channels Let Readers Follow Topics They Care About appeared first on Context.

This is a Contextly Auto-Sidebar on Cult of Mac. The recommendations are algorithmically chosen, and the Auto-Sidebar updates as you publish new content.

At Contextly, we’re big fans of sidebars in the body of stories. Sidebars with smart recommendations show off the depth and breadth of your site, and add a nice visual flair without interrupting a reader’s flow through a story.

Sidebars also typically bump recirculation CTRs 25 to 50%.

So we’re excited to announce that it’s now possible to put algorithmically powered, constantly updating sidebars in every story on your site.

Previously, Contextly sidebars required a little editorial effort to place them in a story. That’s no longer the case.

Now all of your stories, past and future, can now have sidebars (like the one to the left) – without *any* editorial work.

(Note to WordPress users: WordPress calls the the columns alongside stories “Sidebars”. We refer to those as Siderails (and have a Siderail module), keeping with larger industry terminology. When we talk about Sidebars, we are referring to modules *inside* posts.)

We call this Auto-Placement, and it’s part of the update we shipped in the 4.1 update last week.

If you want to see it in action, check out this video.

What this means for you:

With few clicks, you can now have an automatically updating sidebar in every story on your site.

You will need to decide three things, which you can change at any time.

• Where you want the sidebars to display (left side, right side, across the story) and after/before what paragraph?
• What length of stories to show sidebars on (e.g. only show on stories with more than 5 paragraphs)?
• What kind of content to fill the sidebars with (Related, Evergreen/Popular or Custom Content driven by an RSS feed)?

These are all easily chosen in the Control Panel, under Modules -> Auto-Sidebar. Simply turn on Auto-Sidebars and turn on Auto-Placement (as in the image below).

This section of the control panel lets you quickly set the rules for Auto-Sidebars being placed in every post on your site.

Some questions you might have:

• Can I change the settings later or turn this off if I don’t like it? 
  Yes, you can change the settings at any time. If you turn off the feature, no sidebars will show.
• Does this do anything to my WordPress database? What if I stop using Contextly?
  This doesn’t affect your database or write into your posts. It’s done externally. So if you stop using Contextly, your posts will stay the same.
• If I don’t like where the sidebar is on a particular post, can I modify where it shows up? 
  Yes. In WordPress, you can use the Sidebar button in the editor to insert an Auto-Sidebar where you want it in an individual story. Simply put the [contextly-autosidebar] shortcode where you want it to be. This will override the Auto-Placement.
• What if I have existing stories using the Auto-Sidebar? Will there now be two on those stories if I use Auto-Placement? 
  No. There will only be one if you have manually inserted that shortcode into existing stories. The manual shortcode overrides the automatic one.
• What if a story has a manual sidebar in it now? Will there be two sidebars? 
  Yes. If you manually choose the links to go into a sidebar and place that in a story, the Auto-Sidebar will also show up on that story.

Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback by writing us at info@contextly.com

We hope you like the new addition as much as we do.

The post An Auto-Sidebar in Every Post (Better than a Chicken in Every Pot) appeared first on Context.