Why content relevancy should be king
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I fondly remember the days of my adolescence when I clung to my favorite magazine issues as if they were my most-loved pair of jeans. I collected the best of Girl’s Life and Jane (later Lucky and Harper’s Bazaar) to save in little piles on my shelves like books. I would tear out pages to hang as inspiration around my room, or thumb through an old issue for a particular article I remembered and liked. I had my own little treasure-trove of content that I never wanted to give up, despite the increasing physical space it required. Fortunately or not, those days are now long behind us. Sure, magazines are still great (I will never lose my love for them), but they aren’t the be-all-end-all of timely content like they used to be. The Internet moves a mile a minute and what goes on the front page of a popular website today is old news tomorrow.
If you ask yourself how you consume content on a daily basis, chances are good that you click through your favorite websites, or maybe even apps, and take a look at what is new, timely, and on the front page. After perusing the latest and most noteworthy, you probably move on. If you skip your online reading for a day, you might miss out on several quality articles without ever knowing they existed. It only takes hours on most widely-read websites for a post or article to be pushed out of sight and out of mind. Once it happens, that article is no longer new – it will garner a few more hits via later Google searches, but it won’t be easily visible otherwise and chances are low that anyone has saved it as part of a personal content collection like the one I cultivated as an early teen. So for the most part, its time has passed. That article has become part of what we like to call the Invisible Web.
As you can imagine, there is a wealth of quality content sitting just below the Internet’s surface. Publishers like Condé Nast and Time, Inc. have vast archives of often still-relevant content that is usually undiscovered to anyone who didn’t read it during its month of original publication. Internet publishers have archives, too – often just as vast, thanks to the minute-by-minute pace of online content generation. So what happens to all of that content that is in publisher archives or has been pushed off the front page and into the Invisible Web? For now, it gets buried. But what if instead of seeing just the latest and most tweeted-about content we could see the content that was most important to our interests? What if what showed up on the front page was tailored to an audience by relevancy instead of recency?
This is as much a concern for content creators as it is for consumers. It benefits everyone when the provided content is exactly what the consumer desires, whether it was written five days or five years ago. We are content enthusiasts here at Trapit, and surfacing quality discoveries is what we’re all about. Stay with us this week as we talk more about how we’re helping revive archival content for the right audiences at just the right time.
-Kelly