I love that the New York Times is now doing this!
For a short while on March 15, one reader might have seen this:
$2 Billion Worth of Free Media for Trump
While another saw this:
Measuring Trump’s Media Dominance
Any guesses which won the test, and by how much?
The top one got nearly three times as many readers.
A story might be 1,000 words long, but tweaking the tiny handful of words that promoted this one on our homepage gave almost 300% more readers.
In other cases, headline tests have increased readership by an order of magnitude.
When this:
Soul-Searching in Baltimore, a Year After Freddie Gray’s Death
was paired against this:
Baltimore After Freddie Gray: The ‘Mind-Set Has Changed’
The test showed a 1,677% increase in readership for the second one.
