The New York Times hardly needs an introduction as a authoritative American daily newspaper, founded in New York City in 1851. To increase the number of readers the NYT is AB testing the headlines of its articles.
Mark Bulik, a senior editor, writes about recent tests designed to see what kind of headlines attract most readers.
“The Times generally uses the tests when a story isn’t performing as well as expected, and we have a few rules. Both headline options have to meet our standards; we don’t test clickbait versions because no headline should leave readers feeling cheated when they get to the story.”
Hypothesis
Changing the headline to be more conversational (‘$2 Billion Worth of Free Media for Trump’) will increase the number of clicks
Results
The “2 billion” headline resulted in 297 percent more readers.
Learnings
Headlines make a huge difference. There is so much news out there; an article needs to stand out to be read.
“We’ve learned a number of lessons from months of testing, but the most important one is pretty obvious — clear, powerful words and a conversational tone make a big difference.”
Test details
| Test element |
Headline
|
| Page type |
Article |
| Test date |
March 2016 |
Website information
