Dear News Break, You Can’t Force Your Smut-Loving Readers to Consume Hard News
You can program bots to shove local news down their throats, but it may not work
Let me clarify smut. On News Break, that can mean anything from a headline about a Florida man emasculated by his pit bull to soft-core relationship pieces, fashion and beauty, or parenting advice. Pretty much any topic guaranteed to start a war among the commenters qualifies as smut on the outlet that bills itself as the provider of Breaking Local News.
And as creators have discovered under the newest monetization terms, the smut ranks poorly with the powers that be, so it pays at a reduced incentive rate. The hard news, particularly news targeting a specific city, garners the creator a higher payment rate, but sadly, fewer reads in many cases.
Facebook groups of creators are hashing it out by the hour as more creators transition from the old payment program to the new one, only to discover that their smut stories have been cheapened by not only the reduced payment plan but with an algorithm-killing score designed to shield readers from the juicy stuff they’re used to feeding on.
The consensus is that overall views are lower than they were in previous months. Part of that could be the introduction of more creators vying for those coveted page views. But more likely, it’s a sign that the stuff we gleefully churned out in December and January, which saw five and six-digit page view numbers are simply not being shown to News Break’s readers at all.
The instructions are clear
Creators have been told explicitly that local news is their mandate. That alone is odd, considering many of the current creators have no background in journalism. Add to that, the fact that stories are scrutinized (sometimes for hours or even days) and sometimes refused due to any sign of improper language or subject matter, and the situation has become challenging, at best.
Even odder, is that News Break’s primary source of content are the “publishers” from which News Break consolidates the vast majority of its stories. These include traditional news outlets, large and small, as well as a variety of tabloid-style publishers that continue to flood the pages with Man Parts Eaten by Dog headlines that show up beside our newly washed and decidedly tame headlines about beaches and vaccines and city council meetings.
And guess what happens then? Even the measly handful of readers who turn up to our high-value stories are distracted by the smut in the sidebars, often leaving us with two-digit page view tallies.
So what’s a creator to do?
It’s a numbers game as News Break attempts to convert its smut lovers into news readers and teach its bots how to push the content they want to be known for. It feels like being assigned to write a church bowling league column for the National Enquirer. A few are finding the sweet spot that allows them to localize a bit of controversy, gaining them both the higher rate of pay and a reasonable number of page views.
Others have realized that the higher pay rate doesn’t stack up against the potential of those thousands of eyes. The magical number is 16,000 views. Do that with even a low-ranking story and you’ve beaten the system.
Roz Warren has a good example in her story, Hey Homewrecker. It is not news, and definitely not local news, but it’s got 61 comments, and on News Break, comments are a sure sign of high page views. Beautifully done!
But that makes it a no-win for News Break
Now we’re back to our headline. The outlet can neither force its creators to turn its back on the potential for more money nor force its hardcore smut readers to read the news. It must eventually choose between what it wants to be and the path its early readership is locked onto. Because there is a bounty on app downloads for creators, the assumption is that they hope not only that we’ll create the local news they crave but bring a local news-loving audience with us.
That’s a possibility, but the reality is that trashy clickbait works. Sure you landed on the page because you wanted to read about the best places in the U.S. to snorkel, but it’s hard to take your eyes off that poor man’s picture in the sidebar lying spread-eagle in a hospital bed with his nether regions bandaged.
News Break is either going to have to clean up the whole site, potentially losing millions of existing readers, or be content with what they started.