Yahoo.com Front Page Feature

Recently, I had an article of mine featured for several days on the front page of Yahoo.com. It was included in "Editor's Picks" and "Today on Yahoo!" The first appears at the bottom of every news page or article on Yahoo! and the second appears in multiple places including the top, featured position at the home page of Yahoo.com.

I get two questions most frequently from other writers about it. 1) How did you get featured? 2) How many views did it receive?

First, let me say that I've had editors from the Yahoo! Contributor Network (Y!CN) pitch articles of mine for the front page before. At least one made it there previously, but had a shorter run of just a few hours.

Getting featured can depend on luck to some extent. If you have just written about a topic that suddenly becomes very newsworthy and your article is relevant, editors may drop it in to take advantage of the timeliness of  the issue. Then there's always the other breaking news factor. If aliens land on the lawn of the White House, then your article about the National Collegiate Cheerleading Championships might get pushed aside for front page feature consideration.

In any case, it generally takes a body of high quality work that demonstrates your ability to write accurate, interesting and original material. In two of the four cases where my work was pitched to the front page, an editor at Y!CN contacted me in advance and offered a topic that he thought might be a good fit for the front page. For another, I had just submitted an article and it just happened to coincide with a planned press conference by President Obama on the same topic. Another was suggested to me for front page consideration, but missed because the angle I took was a bit too controversial.

Once, an article was suggested, but in doing the research, I found that the suggested premise, though widely accepted by media outlets and various web secondary sources, was inaccurate. I wrote it up as something of a myth-busting article which provided better sources for that real information. It wasn't the fun, human interest piece for which the front page decision makers were hoping.

In short, I don't know of any sure-fire way to get a piece featured on the front page at Yahoo.com except to write well consistently, attract the attention of editors with the quality of your work (and/or by becoming a Featured Contributor), and to be willing to accept difficult assignments that may or may not pan out despite an investment of research time and effort. Also be prepared for one or more title changes and additional editorial scrutiny of any article that is being considered for the front page. I think Editor's Picks, Today on Yahoo! and the text news listing all used different titles for my recent feature, none of which were passed by me before publication (which is fine by me).

As for the second question, my most recent featured article received about 1 million views in the first 24 hours, and about another million over the next 48 hours and during a repeat feature the following weekend. Those who write for Y!CN know the page view bonus rate for Y! News and can calculate that the earnings from that single article went into the thousands of dollars.

In addition to the 2 million page views, it was posted to Facebook by over 13,000 users, Tweeted over 1500 times resulting in more than 45,000 page views via Twitter, and shared by 245 people on Linked In. The article itself was also mentioned and linked by The Huffington Post, Forbes online, and a host of other sites. CNN did a feature piece on the same topic 3-4 days after mine appeared on Yahoo! all of which is helping the article gain about 1000 readers per day long after it passed out of the main stream's attention span.

I'll also note that it was copied in its entirety and otherwise plagiarized by more websites and blogs than I care to mention. That comes with the territory, so learn how to enforce your rights under the DMCA.

I've heard of other Yahoo! feature pieces from Y!CN freelancers getting even more page views than mine by a wide margin. I've also heard of others not doing as well.

Finally, I know some writers don't like to say which of their articles do very well for fear of copycats going after their topics, but I've always felt that the Internet is a very big place. It also helps that I tend to write current events type issues that have high, but fleeting popularity rather than evergreen material. At any rate, here's the article that received the front page feature position for a number of days at Yahoo.com. Feel free to share a link to the original on Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, your blog, or anywhere else. I get paid by the page view and every one counts. ...and don't forget to follow this blog using one of the following option in the margins.

What keyword density should I use?

Originally Associated Content told us to use 2-5% keyword density (or even 3-6% at one point). There was even a general town hall conducted with that advice. They suggested using bolded subheadings to get more keyword reiterations in without making the article sound awkward. That worked, and I did it for a while, but it often made the article difficult to read.

Using synonyms and words that are highly related to the topic works pretty well, too, and doesn't lead to the same sort of awkward constructions. Personally, I don't measure keyword density at all anymore, and I don't target keyword density as a goal at all. I focus on writing something that I would want to read. To me, that means that there is real content in the article, and it doesn't make my head hurt to read it.

Nothing ticks me off more than clicking an article titled something like "Obama Birth Certificate Update" and finding an article that says little more than:
"The Obama birth certificate is in the news again.
One of the top ten Google trends this morning was the Obama birth certificate as controversy continues to swirl around this topic. When first elected, many Obama opponents mounted a public information campaign to try to convince people that Obama was not eligible to be president because he could not produce the long form of the Obama Birth Certificate..." and so on, with absolutely no new information.

As a reader, I expect (or at least hope) to learn something new every time I read a news article. If I can't find something to give the reader in exchange for clicking my clever article title, then I don't write it. Even when I was chasing keywords, I tried to provide some useful content. This example of one of my early AC News articles (when I was using keyword density measures as requested by the AC news department) is still drawing good page views every month after more than two years: It is noticeably keyword heavy, but is still readable.

It scored well on Google search results when first published, but with all the keyword spam competition for the term since then it is nowhere near the top at present. So how are people still finding it? I can find incoming links from a number of quality medical information sites referencing my article. It is not drawing page views because of the keyword density, but because it provides solid, authoritatively sourced information.

In my opinion, the latter strategy will be more effective for news writers in driving both short and long term page views under the new model.

Writing a very high quality, short, targeted piece for the Yahoo! Contributor Network (Y!CN) is much more likely to get picked up by Yahoo! News. That is where we can score really big page views. I have seen a few articles there pick up about 300,000 page views in just a couple days, and many more articles that hit 75,000 to 100,000 or more from a number of Y!CN writers.

My most popular Yahoo! News article to date was not on Google Trends at all when I wrote it, although its main topic did appeared there later. (I'll discuss the sources I use for breaking news story ideas in another post on another day.) It was also linked and tweeted by The Drudge Report and a number of other popular sites, and given a featured position by Yahoo! News. It had more than 2900 Facebook shares, and hundreds of Tweets. That will likely NEVER happen with something like the Obama birth certificate article I described above.

I think the paradigm for attracting eyeballs to AC News (and now Y!CN) articles has shifted, and, in my opinion shifted for the better, with the popularity of social media platforms like Facebook, with the Yahoo! acquisition of Associated Content (AC), and again with Google's latest algorithm change. Consistent creation of really useful material (from a reader's viewpoint) results in more opportunities, especially under the Yahoo! regime. With the old keyword dense articles, I averaged something like 2500-3000/ article over my entire library when I was writing several such news articles each day. I made the top 100 writers for AC for the year 2008 with just six months of membership and a library of about 190 articles in total.

Having stopped chasing keywords and Google Trends and starting to concentrate on delivering consistently higher quality, I now have an assignment desk so full of recurring article requests for publication at Yahoo! News that each come with guaranteed upfront payments in excess of my average per article earnings for the old keyword heavy news articles. That's without a single page view, and without the various miscellaneous one-off requests that come through. For me, the math is pretty clear. In short, Yahoo! and Y!CN want higher quality news content with a much lesser (if any) focus on keyword density and, most importantly, they are willing to pay for it.