How user needs are working at Der Spiegel

There’s an adage that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. We know this to be true, and what follows is a case study showing why reports - and baseline reports in particular - are an invaluable part of your newsroom’s toolkit. Here’s what Der Spiegel learned when they created one.

The client and the story so far

Der Spiegel is a German newsbrand encompassing a weekly print magazine (founded 1947) and a website founded in 1994 as Spiegel Online. The titles became aligned in 2019 and merged titles to share ‘Der Spiegel’ a year later. Headquartered in Hamburg, it is among the top 30 most visited websites in Germany, a leading journalistic brand, and its print edition has one of the highest circulations of its kind in Europe.

• They had been working with smartocto on user needs for a Proof Of Contract, and had already made use of the User Needs Playground and also consulted the resources about user needs.
• Initial findings from these investigations confirmed their suspicions that the newsroom might benefit from a user needs related content strategy

The project: baseline strategy

The data & research team of Der Spiegel reached out to smartocto with a request to create a baseline report that would give them insights into the effectiveness of their content strategy (regarding user needs) but that would also reveal opportunities to optimise their strategy.

"I figured that with the help of smartocto we could even get more proof that our content strategy could benefit from a more user needs centric approach. By making our raw data available, we hoped that smartocto would be able to perform in-depth analyses that would help us to understand the published articles of Der Spiegel regarding User Needs and how the different user needs are adopted by our users."
--- Alexander Held, Senior Data Scientist

The process

We got a data dump from all the stories published behind Die Spiegel’s paywall between January 1, 2024 until the end of September 2024. That gave us a whole lot of information about unique visitors, attention time, topics, use of user needs, end of article scrolls, amount of articles read per session etc.

Based on these insights we created our report - and thanks to the automatic User Needs Tagger we were also able to label all the articles on the 4 main axes of the user needs model (fact-driven, context -driven, emotion-driven and action-driven).

We also had a look at Der Spiegel’s actual brand DNA to see if their brand promise matches the output of content.

We can’t give you the exact numbers of that report, but we are able to share some really interesting results and strategic insights.

So let’s do that, shall we?

There is an overproduction of context-driven content

Over 80% of the content that Der Spiegel produces (again behind the paywall content) is created from a contextual perspective, meaning these articles address either the Give me perspective (with analysts and experts) or Educate me (unravelling complex things) user needs. This aligns with Der Spiegel’s brand promise:

However, Der Spiegel’s audience clearly signals that they also find value in news from other perspectives too. Meaning that, in our humble opinion, the output should be:

1. A better balance of user needs
2. Better divided amongst various topics - They should maybe even consider creating specific product developments in order to serve certain user needs better - Der Spiegel is now addressing the action & emotion driven user needs with its new format Spiegel Extra (https://www.spiegel.de/extra) it will be very interesting to see how this will work out.

"This data report has shown us once again that data informed decision making is an essential part of today's newsrooms. The baseline report smartocto has provided for us is just what we needed to start looking into our audience’s User Needs at Der Spiegel - and to learn a lot about our topics from another perspective. I’m looking forward to integrating the User Needs approach from smartocto into our editorial workflows and to start using those insights to help us grow our relevance."
--- Simon Schwandner, Head of Data & Research

Bonus insight

Another thing we discussed with Der Spiegel was that - from our perspective - creating more fact driven content before the paywall might well attract a larger crowd (i.e. potential subscribers) which in turn may well help maximise conversions (an important part of their overall strategy).

"We do see that the action driven articles work well for newer audiences. Fact driven is kind of our main category, but less powerful, especially for these newer audiences."
--- Simon Schwandner, Head of Data & Research

User needs articles lack focus: a lot of stories address multiple user needs

We know from the data that audiences respond better to articles that have a clear focus. This usually means that the headline, format and topic are all in line with a single user need - not just the body of the article itself.

If you want to play around to see how your stories score on the user needs approach you can use The Playground and simply analyse your article.

But this is a challenge for newsrooms, publishers and storytellers alike - and Der Spiegel is no exception. It is common for articles to lack a proper ‘user need focus’, but this is difficult: a lot of stories address multiple user needs and it’s almost impossible to write a 100% ‘pure’ article, anyway.

TOP TIP -> Aim for a score of over 55 for the dominant user need you’re using. Training your newsroom to better understand the mechanics of different user needs can be very helpful in this process.

Attention time is the highest for context-driven articles

Good news for Der Spiegel: their audience’s attention is highest for contextual pieces - and that’s bang in line with their brand promise. We know that contextual pieces tend to be the longest, so the fact that Der Spiegel’s are outperforming is brilliant. They clearly understand their audience. Which is precisely the point.

So there you have it. A little data deep dive, done. If you think creating your own baseline report would help sharpen your focus at your own newsroom, get in touch! We’d love to hear from you.