Branded Content Can Generate Significant Audience Engagement

Results from a New York Times T Brand Studio and Chartbeat study released today indicate that The Times’s native advertising platform, Paid Posts, can generate significant audience engagement, on par with some editorial content on NYTimes.com and other publisher sites. The study also shows that most Paid Post content produced by T Brand Studio during the research period proved to be significantly more engaging than the content supplied by third parties.

Chartbeat compared five metrics for the research, including traffic (unique visitors), total engagement (active, engaged time on a page) and visits from Facebook, Twitter and Google (search).

In every category, Paid Posts created by T Brand Studio outperformed Paid Posts produced by the advertiser. Specifically, T Brand Studio-produced content generated 361% more unique visitors and 526% more time spent than advertiser-produced content.

On Facebook and Twitter, T Brand Studio content outperformed advertiser-produced content by 1,613% and 504%, respectively. Google visits to T Brand Studio-produced content exceeded advertiser-produced content by 632%.

The research also shows that while traffic on median-performing Paid Posts does not outperform traffic on median-performing NYTimes.com editorial content, some high-performing T Brand Studio posts received enough traffic to generate as much engagement as some editorial content on NYTimes.com.

During the study period, at least five Paid Posts placed above NYT 10K (i.e. among the top 5,000 editorial articles on NYTimes.com) and one Paid Post, “Women Inmates: Why the Male Model Doesn’t Work,” from Netflix, was among the top 1,000 traffic articles on NYTimes.com during the same period.

When compared to the Chartbeat 100K, half of the Paid Posts produced by T Brand Studio over-indexed editorial content on these sites.

The research was conducted between January 8 and December 15, 2014.