The New Media Metric: How Shareable is Your Content?

Study after study indicates that Americans have developed all kinds of new habits when it comes to consuming the news. But one key upward trend that tends to get overlooked in the fine print of these studies is how popular content-sharing has become.

"To a great extent, people's experience of news, especially on the Internet, is becoming a shared social experience," the Pew Research Center reported recently, "as people swap links in emails, post news stories on their social networking site feeds, highlight news stories in their Tweets and haggle over the meaning of events in discussion threads. For instance, more than 8 in 10 online news consumers get or share links in emails."

In its study, Pew found that 72 percent of Americans say they follow the news "because they enjoy talking with others" about it; three-quarters say they get news links via email or social media sites like Twitter or Facebook.

As to what kinds of content users are looking to share, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania studied the list of most e-mailed articles from the New York Times over a six-month period, and found that people preferred e-mailing articles "with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics...Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list."

The propensity to share certain types of content also has implications for how effective advertising can be, according to a recent study commissioned by the Associated Press. Though "many news consumers feel bombarded by advertising," the study found, they "are more receptive to it if is presented in a trusted, interactive environment."

An anthropologist involved with the AP study suggested that online new providers need to adjust their business models to emulate the "social networking phenomenon online, where consumers feel comfortable engaging with information among their friends and peer groups," according to the AP report. "You have to socialize the space before you can monetize it," the anthropologist stated.

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