Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Right. The way we look at it is that our news brings people to the site and then we create a community around that news and then the question is okay, you've got this great community, how can you provide value to that community and to the people who want to reach it. And if you think about it in that abstract way, then all these really interesting possibilities come up. If you just think about it as “I’ve got people coming to my website, I want to serve them ads,” then it’s too simplistic and it’s a decade ago mentality. So this is all part of that broader evolution and how publishers think. In thinking about Instant Articles, some of the bigger publishers that have this sort of a trained behavior of a whole city going to their website every morning, much like they used to read their paper at their dining room table every morning and they worry about doing something like this because it untrains that habitual behavior of going to the site. Do you guys worry at all about sort of losing that oh, they’re not used to going to GeekWire anymore? Certainly there is a core set of your readers who will always do that, but so much anymore the front door or, yes, the front door of your website is not your homepage, it’s an article that somebody comes into and when we think about the design of the site, we think about that, you know, this is really the place that people are coming to. And that’s driven by social. It’s the fact that people are getting a link off of Twitter or off of Facebook and they’re coming in to your site through the backdoor essentially.…

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