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[upbeat music] Thanks a lot, Nick. Appreciate it. Sophia, thank you for joining us. So let's get right into it. First of all, explain, explain your role, like, at Metro. Most days I don't know what I do. [laughs] Okay.

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So my role- It's relatable. [laughs] As audience director, I oversee what we call the audience teams, SEO, social media, social video.

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We have a new growth team, and I overall help our senior executive and editor-in-chief to put forward the strategy for digital growth. Okay. So what I, I often have...

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You know, I do podcasts with, with publishing executives, mostly in the US, but also in the UK.

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We do- we host dinners and things, and I always compare and contrast the challenges that people come to, and traffic is usually top. What's been the journey there?

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Because a lot of the traffic channels when it comes to distribution have become less reliable. Facebook obviously moved away from sending all of that traffic.

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I'm sure you-- I'm sure unfortunately you were also affected by that. Google has become far less reliable. Give me the idea of what the traffic picture has been like at Metro over, say, the last four years.

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It's been an absolute rollercoaster. [laughs] Um, that's the only way I can call it.

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So I think, so I joined Metro about two and a bit years ago, and was it October twenty twenty-two that some core update on Google got us, and we lost that traffic.

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And a few months after, we lost our Facebook traffic when they decided they no longer liked news publishers as much. So it was really hard for us. It was a lot of traffic that we had suddenly lost. Like how much?

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I would say Facebook traffic got us a good sixty percent down. It was really, really hard. Oof. We were- Wait, your overall traffic fell sixty percent? Mm, fifty, sixty. Yeah, I think so. Was that after you joined?

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After I joined. Oh, no. [laughs] Which was really hard as well. I wasn't in the role that I am now, but we saw it drop, and we were like, "Oh, shit, what do we do?" And that's when we started looking.

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I particularly started looking at how much content we were publishing. And in some sections, we noticed that about fifty percent of our content was going nowhere. It just wasn't getting read at all.

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And every time we would tell the newsroom, "Hey, you should try this thing 'cause we think it's gonna get us the pages," the editors would say, "Bugger off. I'm too stretched.

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I don't want to do this thing that you're telling me to do."

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So we realized, okay, something's gotta give, and we turn into a process of explaining to editors, yes, something's gotta give, so let's just really figure out what you need to stop doing and what you need to do more of.

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And so we started a deep analysis process to f- to figure out who was our audience and, and something that we discovered was a newsroom that came of age in the era of Facebook and the journalists that came of age in the era of Facebook, we had a lot of bad habits, and we were used to do things quick and dirty, and it would work, and suddenly that wasn't working anymore.

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So we started thinking, okay, if, if that's not really what people want, what do they want?

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And, and we had to take a step back and give everyone in the newsroom permission to stop and think as well 'cause I think in the past, I've definitely been in newsrooms where as soon as traffic went down and performance went down, it's like, "How is your output?

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Your output has gone down, so you need to keep doing more. You need to keep doing more." And we realized that that wasn't doing it for us. So, so that's where we started to do a bit less to get more.

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Yeah, I wanna get into that because when you say about, like, what the audience wants, I think that era a lot of times sort of fooled a lot of newsrooms into think... You know, they were feeding algorithms.

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They were, they were doing what the algorithms wanted, not necessarily what the audience wanted because the audience was Facebook's audience, which was determined by the algorithm, basically.

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I mean, they weren't really... It wasn't really audience-focused at all, right? And all the incentives, I feel like, that Facebook set up, and really even Google, was always about volume at the end of the day. Yes.

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To play devil's advocate, I do think algorithms do serve audiences to an extent.

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I don't think they go completely against it 'cause ultimately, both Facebook and Google, they want their users to be happy within their space.

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So I think once upon a time, they probably realized, yes, if we serve them this type of content, they will like it, they will stay, and you can do too much of something and then put people off, particularly with news.

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A lot of people are now very put off by news. So algorithms change, but so does the audience, and I think realizing who is your valuable audience was the most important part.

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Yes, there's, there's a lot of people out there that you can reach, but it's about sticking to the ones that actually want news and not just came up on it.

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Yeah, well, that, that's sort of what I meant was that, like, you know, Facebook was looking to serve its audience, right? But that might not necessarily be Metro's audience.

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So when you started to look, like, into the details, first of all, what did you determine? Like, what was Metro's audience? 'Cause... That's still an ongoing process.

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So Metro, it's a, it's a generalist newspaper, and these are not my words, but, you know, we're, we're talking nowadays about generalists having to be a collection of niches, and that's what we're trying to find.

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So we have, for instance, a very strong soaps audience, so TV soaps. We're really good at that, so we have a very strong engaged audience there. But they're not the same readers that they are reading our gaming content.

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So it's also realizing that each vertical of Metro is serving very different people.

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And part of the work that we've done this year, that the growth team has done, was working with each desk to find what we call bespoke solutions to their own challenges and their own problems 'cause-Each editorial desk within the Metro newsroom is like an entirely [laughs] different newsroom on their own.

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They have different processes, different workflows, different audience, different needs. So it was really about finding what worked for each of those, and they're not all the same, not at all.

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Okay, so talk to me about the more with less because, I mean, from my understanding, you actually did alchemy, which is actually cr- producing more traffic with less content. Yes. So that's part of...

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We already had a lot of content that just wasn't hitting, so it was relatively easy to do, as in there was a lot of work, but it was doable. Our star case study is the entertainment desk.

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So entertainment for Q4 last year, they did forty... The article count was down forty-five percent, but their overall traffic was up thirty-five percent.

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So the average page view each story was getting was four times higher than they were a year before.

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And that was in part because it was a, it was a desk that was used to having to be very fast and producing at high volume, fast-breaking showbiz news.

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And at some point we said, "Well, we're not getting these audiences, and we're not competing with perhaps other, um, I don't know, Paris Hilton and, and other publications that are really good at the shows- showbiz lines."

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So that's when we brought it back, and we started thinking, "Okay, who is our audience? Realistically, are we serving this age bracket, this other age bracket? Where, where is our golden audience?"

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And hit more of that and hit more of that and keep doing that.

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So we're always interested still in finding new audiences and, and finding these new spaces, but we really need to get right what we already have because new audiences are hard to come by, so we might as well make sure that we're strong where we already have them.

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Mm-hmm. And so the, the north star is still page views still, right? 'Cause I mean- Hundred percent... a lot of times you hear like, "Oh, scale is dead, you know, it's not about page views." But it's still page views.

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It is for us. There's very different opinions in the industry whether those are... that is the metric that we should have. For Metro, we're still page views.

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It is still that reach of our content, and we still have plenty to go in that sense, I think.

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And for us as well, finding more page views per session has also been part of our KPI, so it doesn't all have to be just came once, like, fly by audience.

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That's, that's also part of becoming really good at the specialisms that we do- Mm-hmm... so that if you land on our website, you can read more than just one article.

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So how many articles was the, the, the typical person responsible for prior to this change?

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It really varied de- desk by desk, but entertainment, I remember asking the editor, and they said, "Oh my God, that's such a high article count, is it?" I was like, "Is there something wrong with analytics?"

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And she was like, "No, that is how many we write." So I think they were writing about nine or ten per person sometimes. Oh my God. It's mad. A day? It's a lot. Yeah. Wow. Very productive. Mm-hmm.

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And so what, what did that end up being cut down to? I mean, basically you're saying, like, half, I guess. Yeah, about half. It depends.

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Obviously, some people would write a bit more, some shift would write a bit more, but I think now there'd be about five. Four or five, depending on...

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We have some specialists that are doing film, for instance, and they just don't write as much.

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It's also as well, we've introduced user needs, so that has really changed as well, the way that the desk thinks about the content.

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So sometimes some stories may be fairly quick, and some stories may need a bit more work and a m- bit more in depth, and it's about balancing that out.

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Whereas before, I guess if you're doing nine or ten stories a shift, they're all very quick and heavy, like... So, I mean, I don't wanna be too simplistic about it, but is it just creating better?

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I mean, because, like, what, what exactly w- was the lever then to be creating less? I mean, it would just... It's better content, but did the... How has the overall traffic patterns changed?

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I mean, 'cause Facebook obviously went to near zero, if not zero, right? How has your, your traffic composi- composition changed?

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So as it's the same time that Facebook went down, Discover made an appearance, and I know every newsroom out there is- Yeah... hitting Discover.

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So we have been benefiting from Discover, but we're also very heavily focused on growing our direct traffic. Yes, it's essentially, it's just better content.

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It's just also hitting that consistency of the same areas that grows our authority and makes people come back. And we're still feeding algorithms to an extent, right?

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If we always do something really well on this particular topic, we will get served more and more. We're also leveraging platforms like Reddit and trying to enter new communities.

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But ultimately it was about let's make better content that people engage with for longer and that they would want to come back and they want to hear what you have to say next. Yeah. Is homepage traffic a KPI?

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Is it important, or is it, like, not really realistic for a brand like Metro? It is important. It's, it's very important for us, and I think even more so will become more important in the coming years.

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I think for Metro, because we also have a print product, I'm looking forward to see what that would look like in the future.

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I think leveraging print products will suddenly become more important than they, it was for the last few years.

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And I think in particular, I do feel very sorry for new independent media that is trying to come up, 'cause discovery is really hard, whereas we do have a legacy name. You know, we do.

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We've been around for twenty-five years, so that helps. Yeah. So we just have a lo- like, a minute, a little less than two minutes, but talk to me a little bit about the culture change and how that was difficult.

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I mean, 'cause a lot of these, a lot of these changes are, I think... feel like the biggest challenges are internal than even than external. Yes. I think the key learning for us in terms of change is communication.

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Communication is so important. You need to keep repeating the same north star. You need to align all your teams.

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You need to identify your change makers and align them first to make sure that they're not, not everyone is trying to change everyone in different directions. So that's, has been very important.

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And I think once you get buy-in and once you get the trust of the people that know what they do and they do it best, and you need to bring them forward and say, "I don't want to change, and I don't want to tell you how to do things, but I can make what you do better, and I can help you find more success," I think that's, that, that's the key point.

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I would say communication is at the, is at the core of any change. Yeah. And I think just, like, reminding people that better, that we're after better, I think is a good rallying cry.

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And that they already know what they're doing and that they're good at it.

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Something that I told one of the editors was, "Look, just because you've done things a certain way and now that doesn't work anymore, that doesn't mean that you're bad at the job or that you've never known how to do it.

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You are very good at it. The rules change. You can do it again." Okay. Cool. Sophia, thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye. Appreciate it. [outro music]