Update: Here’s feedback from Dennis Mortensen
Alex Poon from Visual Revenue has written a post on how news sites can align article lifespans to their readers
I disagree with the approach. It seems non-actionable to me, because it doesn’t factor in the business model of the news site.
Let’s assume we are talking advertising business here.
Then the article lifespan in my opinion is the daily advertising revenue generated on that article. Note that the sources providing the revenue to the article will be shifting over time. While in the first days, revenue will come from traffic directly channeled from the homepage or news aggregators, the article will get, if relevant, over time more and more organic traffic from SERPs and generate revenue from there.
From a business perspective, the article lifespan in terms of Advertising revenue should follow the strategy of the platform. A breaking news site needs to “out-earn” the production costs much, much faster than a longtail content platform, such as in encyclopedic or niche content.
(that’s also one of the reasons, why so many breaking news sites struggle with their business model).
Clearly some articles have then better lifespan models than others, and you can review them e.g. by content category to see, where you have the better chances of earning back your production costs through longtail traffic later on, and where you have to have really high immediate traffic numbers on premium CPM.
