Hey! Arden here, also from 80,000 Hours. I think I can add a few things here on top of what Bella said, speaking more to the web content side of the question:
(These are additional to the ‘there’s a headwind on engagement time’ part of Bella’s answer above – though they less important I think compared to the points Bella already mentioned about a ‘covid spike’ in engagement time in 2020 and marketing not getting going strong until the latter half of 2022 .)
The career guide (https://80000hours.org/career-guide/) was very popular. In 2019 we deprioritised it in favour of a new ‘key ideas series’ that we thought would be more appealing to our target audience and more accurate in some ways, and stopped updating the career guide and put notes on its pages saying it was out of date. Engagement time on those pages fell dramatically.
This is relevant because, though engagement time fell due to this in 2019, a ‘covid spike’ in 2020 (especially due to this article, which went viral: https://80000hours.org/2020/04/good-news-about-covid-19/) masked the effect; when the spike ended we had less baseline core content engagement time.
(As a side note: we figured that engagement time would fall some amount when we decided to switch away from the career guide: ultimately our aim is to help solve pressing global problems, and engagement time is only a very rough proxy for that. We decided it’d be worth taking some hit in popularity to have content that we thought would be more impactful for the people who read it. That said, we’re actually not sure it was the right call! In particular, our user survey suggests the career guide has been very useful for getting people started in their career journeys, so we now think we may have underrated it. We are actually thinking about bringing an updated version of the career guide back this year.)
2021 was also a low year for us in terms of releasing new written content. The most important reason for this was having less staff. In particular, Rob Wiblin (who wrote our two most popular pieces in 2020) moved to the podcast full time at the start of the year, we lost two other senior staff members, and we were setting up a new team with a first time manager (me!). As a result I spent most of the year on team building (hiring and building systems), and we didn’t get as much new or updated content out as normal, and definitely nothing with as much engagement time as some of the pieces from the previous year.
The website’s total year-on-year engagement time has historically been greater than the other programmes, largely because it’s the oldest programme. So it’s harder to move its total engagement time in terms of %.
Also, re the relationship of these figures with marketing, the amount of engagement time with the site due to marketing did go up dramatically over the past 2 years (I’m unsure of the exact figure, but it’s many-fold), because it was very low before that. We didn’t even have a marketing team before Jan 2022! Though we did do a small amount of advertising, almost all our site engagement time before then was from organic traffic, social media promotions of pieces, word of mouth, etc.
(Noticing I’m not helping with the ‘length of answer to your question’ issue here, but thought it might be helpful :) )
Hey! Arden here, also from 80,000 Hours. I think I can add a few things here on top of what Bella said, speaking more to the web content side of the question:
(These are additional to the ‘there’s a headwind on engagement time’ part of Bella’s answer above – though they less important I think compared to the points Bella already mentioned about a ‘covid spike’ in engagement time in 2020 and marketing not getting going strong until the latter half of 2022 .)
The career guide (https://80000hours.org/career-guide/) was very popular. In 2019 we deprioritised it in favour of a new ‘key ideas series’ that we thought would be more appealing to our target audience and more accurate in some ways, and stopped updating the career guide and put notes on its pages saying it was out of date. Engagement time on those pages fell dramatically.
This is relevant because, though engagement time fell due to this in 2019, a ‘covid spike’ in 2020 (especially due to this article, which went viral: https://80000hours.org/2020/04/good-news-about-covid-19/) masked the effect; when the spike ended we had less baseline core content engagement time.
(As a side note: we figured that engagement time would fall some amount when we decided to switch away from the career guide: ultimately our aim is to help solve pressing global problems, and engagement time is only a very rough proxy for that. We decided it’d be worth taking some hit in popularity to have content that we thought would be more impactful for the people who read it. That said, we’re actually not sure it was the right call! In particular, our user survey suggests the career guide has been very useful for getting people started in their career journeys, so we now think we may have underrated it. We are actually thinking about bringing an updated version of the career guide back this year.)
2021 was also a low year for us in terms of releasing new written content. The most important reason for this was having less staff. In particular, Rob Wiblin (who wrote our two most popular pieces in 2020) moved to the podcast full time at the start of the year, we lost two other senior staff members, and we were setting up a new team with a first time manager (me!). As a result I spent most of the year on team building (hiring and building systems), and we didn’t get as much new or updated content out as normal, and definitely nothing with as much engagement time as some of the pieces from the previous year.
The website’s total year-on-year engagement time has historically been greater than the other programmes, largely because it’s the oldest programme. So it’s harder to move its total engagement time in terms of %.
Also, re the relationship of these figures with marketing, the amount of engagement time with the site due to marketing did go up dramatically over the past 2 years (I’m unsure of the exact figure, but it’s many-fold), because it was very low before that. We didn’t even have a marketing team before Jan 2022! Though we did do a small amount of advertising, almost all our site engagement time before then was from organic traffic, social media promotions of pieces, word of mouth, etc.
(Noticing I’m not helping with the ‘length of answer to your question’ issue here, but thought it might be helpful :) )