As humans we are social beings. In fact, in some sports leagues, who have trouble filling the stands, they have moved to smaller, more quaint venues. Fenway Park is Fenway – packed and the place to be. The Old Olympic Stadium where the Montreal Expos played could fit 80,000 but they would only get a quarter of it filled. It felt like you were in someone’s living room, at a not-well-attended party.
It is not much different with a website, even in racing.
Case in point – The Paulick Report.
The Paulick Report engages its readers better than any racing site out there, considering its late start into the fray. At postrank.com, their labs page shows just how much engagement a website has and they have built a metric to describe it – an engagement score.
An engagement score is simply the number of mentions, links, forwards via social media, comments and other interactive measures a story or blog post has. Post Rank weights it based on importance, and voila, we have a score.
Here are three racing websites and their engagement scores for the past 30 days (click to enlarge).
As we can see, drf.com and equibase.com are information sites who fill their niche: The visitors are racing people, or fans who know about them. There is little engagement of their readers, and in turn, a great deal of their content is static content – published, and nothing else. Paulick on the other hand has a huge engagement score. His stories are responded to, and forwarded via news readers, social media and blogs.
Why is this important? Because when you have engagement you have people doing online public relations for you, and your sport. A link or headline from a Paulick story on Facebook or Digg is seen by non-racing fans. If a non-racing fan sees and clicks a link and comes to the report, chances are they see comments – there is someone home in our stadium. It’s good for us.
This does not, of course, mean that the drf or Equibase are doing nothing for racing. They do what they do best. However, with other sports like football and its NFL.com, world cup soccer, MLB.com for baseball and many others all engaging their fans and making it a priority, it is very important for us to have a site like the Paulick Report doing the same. (the Bloodhorse.com also does a good job with this, after their restr
ucturing).
This is especially important for us because we do not have a league office in racing. If we could turn back the clock I am sure (well, in racing maybe not) we would have a www.horseracing.com doing what MLB.com and NFL.com are doing. But we can not turn back the clock of course. In the meantime, Paulick is acting in large part like our league site, by filtering news and opinion to non-traditional racing demographics.
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“Engagement Is A Key Metric For Success.”
Possibly. But writing stilted, stuffy, wooden headlines is not.
The Paulick Report is written with verve.
Sadly, it is not contagious.
Hi Don,
The headline is in regard to a white paper written about branding that I read recently. It discussed nine key metrics to watch for to see if you are branding properly via the web.
I am sorry it is not up to your standard.
Regardless, I agree that many websites, like Ray Paulicks and Seth’s write headlines quite well. I will certainly never have a career in journalism or as an aggregator as they do!
Thanks for your feedback.
Dean
PS: The title is not as you wrote it. The title is “Engagement is a Key Metric for Brand Success”
Great that people like to go there and ‘engage’ one another. But, the credit goes to the people who provide the content (all of the external links, some of which are DRF). Paulick’s best skill is copy and pasting other people’s work, and the occasional instigating to get people arguing in the comments section.
I agree Dr. It’s pretty pathetic actually.
It is pretty impressive what the Paulick Report has done in a very short period of time. People want to talk racing and it has many issues from all walks of the sport that we as fans want to follow. Linking is fine, but ‘engagement’ is the key, as the article mentions. For Paulick’s site to come onto the scene and trap a market eager to be heard, it was a coup. Other sports – go to virtually any of their flagship sites – and this has been going on for years. In racing, it has only just begun, and Paulick has carved out his spot on the web.
It was there for others…… but he grabbed it.
Kudos must go to the Godfather of all aggregate sites-The Drudge Report. Paulick’s site is in the exact same format as The Drudge Report. Anyone could have copied the idea, as Drudge was there first-credit Paulick for copying the format
Dean, did you compare the Paulick Report to Blood-Horse and Thoroughbred Times, which seem more fitting competitors? The PostRank results are interesting — it shows BH bettering PR through most of the same period.
Interesting stuff but why was Bloodhorse.com inexplicably ignored? Not only does it have a higher engagement score than PR but surely it must have more traffic than PR as well. If the general thesis of the article is that PR is serving as the default league website for horse racing then the evidence does not appear to support that statement.
Dan raises a good point, Dean. Where’s the evidence that Paulick Report is “filtering news and opinion to non-traditional racing demographics”? My impression is that PR is very much an insider site, a forum and must-read for people already in racing. That’s the audience that follows, forwards, and comments. No argument that within the game, its visitors are engaged. But I’m not so sure that’s true outside. I don’t see a lot of non-racing people on it, or referring to it, unlike BH or DRF or the major New York, LA, and Kentucky newspapers.
Paulick’s success is based largely on my insightful and usually brilliant comments to the stories he aggregates there. People love the comments. Thank you.
Mr Ed,
I agree. Talking horses make for good engagement :)
Dan,
I mentioned the BH in the piece. Yes the BH does a good job as I alluded to in the second last paragraph.
The main reason I looked at DRF and Equibase is that they are a little less inside baseball. As well, BH revamped their web presence while Paulick was here (if I am not mistaken). A response to him, perhaps? I dont know. I thought about making my thesis about how a little guy can compete with the big guys showing the BH and Paulick graphs, but my conclusions generally would be the same as with this thesis. As well, because both Ray and BH have a history, I did not want to turn the post into that, even slightly. (but now I have :))
In addition, Ray does not news feed or RSS tons of stories a day like news sites. His proprietary stories are not of that frequency, which in my opinion, strengthens his case. When he writes something, it gets filtered around the social web. It makes me wonder what score he could glean with a full staff like other pubs in our sport.
Jess,
We do not have access to google analytics data for any of these sites, so it is impossible to say for sure about engaging non-racing fans. The engagement score is a measure that we can use, though.
From post rank: “Engagement events are social activities centered around people sharing your content online with other people. But just as all the social interactions people perform do not have the same level of effort, meaning, or importance, not all engagement events represent the same level of effort, importance or “weight”. ”
continuing: “An engagement score is the total number of engagement points earned by all the sources of engagement events for a single piece of content, like a blog post. So the number of points for each trackback, comment, tweet, Delicious bookmark, Reddit vote, etc. are added up ”
If this was simply “comments left on blogs” drf’s score would be much higher, as we know their traffic and how many comments will be left on an Illman piece etc. It is more: FB, RSS, raceday 360 and so on.
By definition postrank measures reach. The higher the number, the better the reach, so therein was my conclusion (based on this web metric). I use postrank in my real job often, so I am fairly sold on their numbers and have faith in them.
Everyone is looking for reach to expand their core market – a two man shop has arguably done that better than anyone in our sport. I found that a very compelling characteristic, and worthy of my thesis for this little article.
Im glad that it spurred some discussion here regardless.
Dean
Did Paulick copy Drudge or did Drudge copy Paulick?
I like the format.
Ray likes to influence the news sometimes but then again so do I. wink wink
Opps! I did incompletely quote/thus misquoted your headline – for which I do apologize.
Your line of work does veer towards what is strictly cerebral, but do try to use at least one word in a h/l that conveys a sense of motion, immediacy, impact!
You find your work interesting. Make it AS attractive to others – right off the bat.
For instance, above – instead of “key,” why not, instead, “vital”?
Thank you for responding to my criticism in a good-natured spirit.
*****
Jessica, if I may:
Your impression of the Paulick Report being “an insider” venue, I believe, is somewhat – but not by much – off the mark.
The reason why is that – with the rare exception of articulate/insightful owners/breeders such as Barry Irwin & Cot Campbell – the majority of people who are “engaged” with the PR are the paying fans, most of whom but not all are also referred to as “the bettors.”
As it has often been accurately noted, one could pay admission to a racetrack every single day of one or more meets for 40 consecutive years & yet have virtually no influence upon the decisions made by the sport’s executives (on- & off-track) & owners.
The bettors also receive virtually no meaningful recognition from representatives of these two groups. “Insiders” would normally be accorded this courtesy.
The final third segment of the actual racing insiders – the trainers & jockeys – also almost never directly contribute to the feedback option that the Paulick Report has so wisely made as part of the “load-bearing integrity” of their site.
Whatever the trainers have to say are usually the rehearsed responses to questions in pre- & post-race interviews, later flap-jacked into articles (wherein you can also find the business-as-usual, equally trite remarks of the owners).
This can be amusing. One summer, I asked a trainer up in Saratoga about a quite remarkable experience he had had, earlier in the year. To my utter amazement (& dismay), he virtually repeated – almost verbatim – what he had originally said in the post-event interview published in the Blood Horse.
But I’ll agree with you in that the language of racing as it is found in racing web sites & magazines, as well as at the track itself, is infested with “slang” that is virtually incomprehensible to the non-racing public – & which immediately turns that non-racing public off, permanently.
It is horrible.
Once in a while, someone will wake up, realize what’s going on, &, for example, eliminate the ridiculously archaic word, “distaff,” from ad campaigns, etc. (as did the Breeders’ Cup executives).
But this is a once-a-year commendable shooting star, compared to the galaxies of nonsensical words & phrases that audibly orbit around the racetracks & which also land comfortably into stale racing writing that repels readers who are new to the sport.
The PR took stale & threw it overboard. Thank goodness.
I have learned a lot about the problems in thoroughbred racing from articles cited in the paulick report. I have also learned from some of the informative and rational comments on the articles and blogs. Paulick Report is performing a public service for the industry and includes articles on racing from local newspapers as well as industry magazines.