2024 is a big year for elections around the world, with at least 64 countries and the European Union heading to the polls, representing 49 percent of the world’s population.
Election coverage is a major audience draw for publishers, and can provide a much needed boost for readership and ad revenues. But with some advertisers remaining cautious around political content, it’s key that publishers have a good understanding of what sorts of content drive engagement, in order to maximise the opportunity.
UK publisher collective Ozone, which sells ads across a number of major news publishers, analysed audience traffic across its publisher footprint during the UK’s recent campaign season. Ozone’s analysis found that the election results not only drew a lot of engagement, but that page views for results coverage actually beat out ex-Prime Minister Liz Truss’s resignation and Queen Elizabeth II’s death, two of the UK’s biggest news stories in recent years.
Here are some of the more interesting findings from Ozone’s data:
Election engagement remained high throughout the campaign
The length of the official campaign process in the UK is fairly short (compared to say the US presidential election), making it easier to sustain reader interest for the duration. But some commentators had predicted a fairly bland campaign, citing a supposed lack of major ambitious policy proposals from either of the two biggest parties, leading to fears that engagement would be low.
Ozone’s data however found that readership for news and politics stories remained high through the six weeks, helped by a steady stream of election-related news stories.
In the week which ex-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called the election, page views on news and politics stories reached 152 million across Ozone’s footprint, up 11 percent week-on-week. Total views climbed over the next two weeks, reaching 173.3 million on the week beginning June 3rd, driven by coverage of the controversy surrounding Sunak’s early departure from a D-Day commemoration event.
Viewership fell across the next few weeks, but remained significantly above normal levels. Then on the week of the election itself, readership across news and politics stories peaked at 193.8 million page views. Results day itself was also significant in bringing in audiences who weren’t as engaged with the rest of the campaign, with 20 percent total audience growth compared with the previous seven day average.
Key issues determine most-read content, but there are opportunities in neglected issues
As might be expected, the key issues and debates across the election campaign had a big impact on the types of news and politics articles audiences engaged with.
Articles covering the economy, healthcare, defence, and immigration all saw very high levels of engagement, which increased significantly across the course of the campaign. Immigration-related content saw the biggest jump, with page views up by 381 percent in week 5 of the campaign, compared with week 1. Page views on content related to the economy grew by 195 percent during that time period, and content related to defence grew by 91 percent.
Interestingly, page views on climate-related content actually fell over the same period. That’s not because readers weren’t interested – climate indexed highly in terms of audience interest across all age groups. But a lack of major policy differences between the main parties meant there wasn’t much coverage. This however suggests an opportunity for publishers who can find ways to cover issues which perhaps aren’t reflected in the primary political debates and new stories, but which are important to readers.
Ozone also found that the audience make-up for articles covering specific policies often reflected the demographics of those likely to be affected by the policies in question. Defence-related content for example saw high readership among young viewers, which Ozone said was driven by Rishi Sunak’s proposal of introducing a new form of national service. Over 55s meanwhile engaged highly with articles related to the economy, due to the implications for pensions and taxes.
Positive analysis draws frequency
A lot of analysis across the election campaign had negative sentiment behind it – all of the reporting on major parties has much more negative sentiment that positive. But Ozone’s data shows there are benefits to audience engagement from maintaining a neutral or even positive tone.
In week four of the campaign, when manifestos were launched, Ozone found 43 percent and 17 percent readership growth for politics content which had a neutral and positive sentiment respectively. This suggests hunger for balanced reporting, giving an unbiased rundown of each party’s manifesto.
Ozone’s data also found an interesting divide between positive and negative sentiment content. Content with an overall negative tone tended to get more page views, but articles with a positive tone achieved 12 percent higher frequency – meaning users were going back to read the same content more frequently.
