Washington Post’s ‘Bandito’ Tool Optimizes Content for Clicks
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Re: Washington Post’s ‘Bandito’ Tool Optimizes Content for Clicks
#2I imagine that the only reason that the title is not "How Washington Post’s ‘Bandito’ Tool Optimizes Content For Clicks" is that the editor of the WSJ rejected it.
Re: Washington Post’s ‘Bandito’ Tool Optimizes Content for Clicks
#3I find this unsurprising. I'd always assumed that some of the more clickbait-ey 'news' sites were doing this already.
Re: Washington Post’s ‘Bandito’ Tool Optimizes Content for Clicks
#4I was expecting the headline to be something in the line of "Find out the shocking way this Amazon-bankrolled newspaper is getting more clicks!"
Re: Washington Post’s ‘Bandito’ Tool Optimizes Content for Clicks
#5So... this is just A/B testing? What's so newsworthy about this? Would've been really something if it could optimize content that's not going to be seen by 100,000 people. Kinda hard to A/B test something that will only have 1000 pageviews in its lifetime.
Re: Washington Post’s ‘Bandito’ Tool Optimizes Content for Clicks
#6'bandito' likely comes from multi-armed bandit, a technique for implementing a/b tests (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2844870?hl=en)
Re: Washington Post’s ‘Bandito’ Tool Optimizes Content for Clicks
#7So this tool picks the title that gets more often clicked on. If they'd only use it for one article or section of their site, this section probably get an advantage compared to the rest. But they want to use it on all articles to get an advantage over the competitors.
I wonder if this actually improves absolute engagement, or whether it just improves engagement with each post relative to the others.
I fear they are optimizing the wrong variable. If they don't take into account click counts for competitor's web sites, then they will have a lot of "optimized" click-baity headlines. Those will always win in A-B tests against non-optimized WP headlines, but not necessarily against competitor's articles, and especially it is not said that they will increase the total traffic to the WP.
In the worst case, every link will say "Click here to receive your free prize!"...
Re: Washington Post’s ‘Bandito’ Tool Optimizes Content for Clicks
#8The first person the article gives credit to is Bezos, asserting his presence influenced the tool. Is it safe to doubt he had anything to do with this? I would expect this type of tooling from any web publication with in house engineering staff.
Re: Washington Post’s ‘Bandito’ Tool Optimizes Content for Clicks
#9I find this unsurprising. I'd always assumed that some of the more clickbait-ey 'news' sites were doing this already.
I've always thought that between clicks and SEO, this is why the URLs of articles sometimes can vary so widely from the title.
Re: Washington Post’s ‘Bandito’ Tool Optimizes Content for Clicks
#10Testing titles isn't that innovative on the whole but coupled with different teasers on the homepage and automating that test seems to be something you don't often see.
For example, on the homepage now the primary headline is "Trump, Sanders roll to victory." It actually goes to the same story as "Jumbled finish could keep GOP field from thinning." I suspect bandito would test headlines but also integrate into which story to put in the headline to increase engagement.