Financial Express on why ‘discipline beats dopamine’ in the page view era
Speaking at our recent Digital Media India Conference in New Delhi, Vertika Kanaujia, who leads editorial operations at Financial Express Digital, traced how newsrooms arrived at this point, citing a recent WAN-IFRA and FT Strategies study as a reference point for the scale of the problem.
From mass media to the page view
Kanaujia traced this back through what she described as three eras of news measurement, from television ratings and readership in the mass-media era, to the search era’s shift toward Google-optimised keywords, to today’s algorithm-driven landscape where newsrooms find themselves reading crawler behaviour rather than their actual readers.
“This has produced systematic ways in which data gets misread,” she said.
Kanaujia pointed to confirmation bias, where data analysis is shaped to validate decisions already made on instinct, often by senior leadership, and to a tendency to wrongly assume causation, where a story’s headline or strong impressions get credited for its performance without examining what actually drove it.
The clearest failure, she argued, is outright manipulation: “Once page views become newsrooms’ target, headline-chasing and clickbait follow.”
To illustrate, she compared two recent Financial Express stories: a basic news story that drew roughly a 100,000 page views within 48 hours, with placement on Google Discover, but generated very little engagement; and a data-annotation story that took two to three months to report, drew comparatively few page views, but held readers’ attention far longer.
The first kind of story drives page views and the revenue tied to them, Kanaujia said. The second, she said, is closer to what builds long-term trust and subscriber growth, citing Indian Express’ investigative print journalism as an example of work that underperforms on page views but has helped grow subscriber numbers over time.
Page views measure traffic, not readers
Kanaujia argued that a page view count is frequently misread as a count of actual readers. “A story credited with a million page views does not mean a million people read it. Page views can be generated through various technical means unrelated to genuine readership,” she said.
That’s a gap that most legacy newsrooms still don’t account for, since they write for the platform first and consider the actual user only afterward, she said.
Reorienting that, Kanaujia said argued, requires newsrooms to first define their organisational objective, whether that is advertiser revenue, reader revenue, or subscriptions, and to build their data strategy and understanding of users around that objective, rather than letting whichever content category is already generating page views dictate further investment.
The North Star, redefined without page views
Kanaujia cited Indian Express’ organisational ‘North Star,’ noting that it contains no reference to page views and has instead been converted into a measurable KPI framework applied across the organisation, from leadership down to individual writers, product staff, and technical teams.
Under this framework, she said, Indian Express tracks audience engagement against acquisition for every employee through a dashboard, alongside newer metrics: content quality and relevance, engaged time per user, retention rate, consistency of returning users, and subscriber conversion, with habit formation assessed over a roughly three-month gestation period.
Kanaujia drew a parallel to The New York Times’ 2017 shift away from chasing page views, which led the publication to invest in non-news habits such as games and cooking content as ways of building reader relationships beyond the article itself.
Discipline over dopamine
Kanaujia summarised the broader shift as newsrooms needing to move away from SEO and Google-driven content habits.
“Discipline beats dopamine,” she said, describing this as a deliberate detoxification process that may cause short-term performance dips in exchange for longer-term value.
She closed by referencing a user-needs framework built around four drivers: users coming to a publication to learn, to understand, to feel, and to be moved to act.
Each, Kanaujia said, maps to a different set of KPIs, from page views and discoverability for simply keeping users updated, to social shareability for emotionally resonant, human-interest stories.
Matching an organisation’s specific editorial strengths to these user needs, she argued, is what allows newsrooms to set KPIs with real purpose behind them.
“Data is true. It’s just about how we want to analyse it,” she said.
