Bojan Cvejić is a valuable interlocutor. His whole life is in online media.
Valuable because it can be asked if portals are looking for clickers instead of readers. Are they ready for almost anything for a click and does that promote the demise of journalism?
Cvejić, who edited two of the ten most read portals in Serbia (Danas and N1), does not think so. In one text, he recently described why the criticism of the "chase for clicks" sometimes considered malicious.
Newspapers have always wanted circulation, because of influence and profit, and portals want visits, he writes. That visit, he says, does not have to be sensationalized. But, for our newsletter Medjuvreme, he presented a couple of "tricks" on how to increase the number of visits.
How much pressure is the editor under to increase traffic? "I don't know how it is in tabloid newsrooms, but in these more decent ones there are no special pressures. There is a monthly goal that editors and journalists know and try to fulfill," says Cvejić.
When quality suffers
Other journalists say that some newsrooms make rankings according to which journalist brought the most clicks. This forces people into hyperproduction, into copying as many news items as possible. In some places, bonuses are paid for this.
After all, count how many "news" portals publish every day. That number goes up to a thousand! Is there so much news?
Cvejić says that it is not just about attracting ads - the number of clicks automatically raises the income from Google's of ads (which are displayed automatically), but it is not a key revenue.
There is prestige and competition, of course. "Actually, the most important thing - and this is probably the mission of every media and journalist - is to reach as many readers as possible who will follow their work."
In this, some resort to cheap tricks and quality and ethical standards suffer, says Cvejić.
A couple of tricks
Bojan Cvejić has recently been teaching at the university and working as an independent media consultant. Now he discovers a couple of "tips" on how to increase readership.
"Believe it or not, original and quality content that differs from the hyper-production and propaganda of most mainstream media works best," he says.
The cake includes the publication of the weather forecast for the next month - that's what people like to read. Some also publish horoscopes.
"Texts about non-working days of the year always go well, so the media often repeats them. Biographies of personalities who are in the center of attention at that moment, 'how to' and lifestyle texts that interest people, especially if they are seasonal, are read."
The clickbaits of Blic, the most read domestic portal for years, are legendary. They almost once a month publish a text about a plane crash with horrible details... so that the reader, only when he clicks, will see that it was an accident from a couple of decades ago.
Google must love you.
According to Cvejić, the media, for whom such a thing is beneath their honor, must follow trends, but also serve a powerful algorithm.
To write in such a way that Google "likes" the text and positions it well in the search, and huge sums of money are spent on the promotion of texts on Facebook and other networks.
"Some, as far as I've heard, increase their budgets significantly at the end of the month so that in a day or two they can jump two or three places on the monthly list of the most visited websites," says Cvejić.
Then there are the famous "push notifications" - when an extremely important and urgent news pops up on your phone. And actually there is nothing urgent five times a day.
Good texts are great, but without these "catches" you won't be among the most read websites, says Cvejić.
