Great work—excited to see so much growth across the podcast, one-on-one service & job board! I’m curious about web engagement though.
Web engagement hours fell by 20% in 2021, then grew by 38% in 2022 after we increased investment in our marketing.
This implies that engagement hours rose by ~10% in 2022 compared to 2020. This is less than I would have expected given the marketing budget rose from $120k in 2021 to $2.65m in 2022. I’m assuming it was also ~$120k in 2020 (but this might not be true). Even if we exclude the free book giveaway (~£1m), there seems to have been a ~10x increase in marketing here that translated to a 10-40% rise in engagement hours (depending whether you count from 2020 or 2021).
In 2022, the marketing programme spent $2.65m (compared to ~$120k spent on marketing in 2021). The bulk of this spending was on sponsored placements with selected content creators ($910k), giving away free books to people who signed up to our newsletter ($1.04m), and digital ads ($338k).
I can think of a bunch of reasons why this might be the case. For example:
Maybe the price of acquiring new users / engagement hours increases geometrically or something
It looks like marketing drove a large increase in newsletter subs. Maybe they’re engaging with the content directly in their inbox instead?
Maybe you expect a lag in time between initial reach & time spent on the 80k website for some reason (e.g. because people become more receptive to the ideas on 80k’s website over time, especially if they’re receiving regular emails with some info about it)
Maybe marketing mainly promoted podcast / 1-1 service / job board (or people reached by marketing efforts mainly converted to users of these services)
See screenshot from the full report for extra context on engagement hours, unique visitors & subscribers:
Again, great work overall. I’d be really curious to hear any quick thoughts anyone from 80k has on this?
Hey Cillian — thanks so much for a really thoughtful/detailed question!
I’ll take this one since I was the only staff member on marketing last year :)
The short answer is:
Marketing ramped up considerably over the second half of 2022. Web engagement time grew a lot more in the second half of 2022 as well — if we just compare Q3 &Q4 2020 and 2022, engagement time grew 50% (rather than 10%).
But that still doesn’t look like web engagement time rising precisely in step with marketing investment, as you point out!
We don’t know all the reasons why, but the reasons you gave might be part of it.
There are five other reasons I want to mention:
marketing didn’t focus on engagement time
people we find via marketing seem less inclined to use our advice than other users
there’s a headwind on engagement time
site engagement time doesn’t count the book giveaway
2020 was a bumper year!
The long answer...
It’s true that there’s only a 10% rise in engagement time between 2020 and 2022.
The main thing going on here is that marketing investment didn’t rise until the second half of 2022 — I spent a while trying out smaller scale pilots. So the spend is very unevenly distributed.
If we compare just Q3 and Q4 (i.e. Q3 and Q4 2020 with Q3 and Q4 2021 and Q3 and Q4 2022), there was a 6% fall from 2020 to 2021, and then a 59% rise from 2021 to 2022, resulting in an overall 50% rise from 2020 to 2022!
But our marketing budget still rose by a lot more than 50% — so what’s going on there?
I’ll start out with the reasons you gave then add my own:
Maybe the price of acquiring new users / engagement hours increases geometrically or something
Yeah I don’t exactly know how the price of finding new users increases, but we should probably expect some diminishing returns from increased investment.
It looks like marketing drove a large increase in newsletter subs. Maybe they’re engaging with the content directly in their inbox instead?
I think this might be a smallish part of it — I’ve noticed an effect where if the email we send on the newsletter is itself full of content, people click through to the website less than if the newsletter doesn’t itself provide much value.
I don’t think this can account for tons of what we’re seeing, though, just cos I don’t think the emails work as a 1:1 replacement for 80k’s site (I can’t really imagine there being much of a ‘substitution effect’ here).
Maybe you expect a lag in time between initial reach & time spent on the 80k website for some reason (e.g. because people become more receptive to the ideas on 80k’s website over time, especially if they’re receiving regular emails with some info about it)
I think this might be a pretty big part of what’s going on.
There does seem to be a significant ‘lag time’ from people first hearing about us and people making an important change to their careers (about 2 years on average) and I think there’s often a lag before people get really engaged with site content, too.
Also, bear in mind that because of what I said about the ‘unevenness’ of growth from marketing, people who found out about us this year are mostly still really new.
Maybe marketing mainly promoted podcast / 1-1 service / job board (or people reached by marketing efforts mainly converted to users of these services)
Yep, I did put some resources directly towards promoting the podcast, and a much smaller amount of resources towards directly promoting 1-1 (about 7% of the budget as a whole, and probably more like 10% of my time). So this could be (a small) part of what’s going on.
There are five other main things I think explain this effect:
Marketing didn’t focus on engagement time
My focus was really on reaching new users, rather than trying to get people to spend time with our content.
For example, last year I spent almost zero effort and resources on trying to get people who already knew about 80,000 Hours to engage with stuff on the site.
People who find out about us via marketing are, on average, less interested in our advice
I think this is probably a pretty big factor here!
There’s a headwind on engagement time, i.e. engagement time by default seems to go down over time
We think this is because, e.g.:
Articles that were last updated longer ago are seen as less relevant by search engines and deprioritised
Things we wrote become out of date and less useful to people
There might be some broader internet trend where people are spending more time on social media and less time on individual websites
Our current metric doesn’t incorporate engagement time from reading the books in the book giveaway
However, we are looking into including it in future reporting!
My (still ongoing) analysis of survey results about the book giveaway suggest that this engagement time is at least tens of thousands of hours, possibly >100k hrs.
(For context, our average monthly engagement time since Jan 2021 is about 8,000 hours (ha!)).
2020 was weird
We saw a very large spike in traffic in early 2020 — partly because we had content on COVID when many places didn’t, and partly because of the broader trend where tons of sites got a lot more traffic as people were staying home and spending more time online.
So 2020 might be an “inappropriate benchmark” or something like that.
Okay I hope that gives you an insight into what I think is going on here! Sorry for length :)
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 :) )
Great work—excited to see so much growth across the podcast, one-on-one service & job board! I’m curious about web engagement though.
This implies that engagement hours rose by ~10% in 2022 compared to 2020. This is less than I would have expected given the marketing budget rose from $120k in 2021 to $2.65m in 2022. I’m assuming it was also ~$120k in 2020 (but this might not be true). Even if we exclude the free book giveaway (~£1m), there seems to have been a ~10x increase in marketing here that translated to a 10-40% rise in engagement hours (depending whether you count from 2020 or 2021).
See quote from this recent post for context on marketing spend:
I can think of a bunch of reasons why this might be the case. For example:
Maybe the price of acquiring new users / engagement hours increases geometrically or something
It looks like marketing drove a large increase in newsletter subs. Maybe they’re engaging with the content directly in their inbox instead?
Maybe you expect a lag in time between initial reach & time spent on the 80k website for some reason (e.g. because people become more receptive to the ideas on 80k’s website over time, especially if they’re receiving regular emails with some info about it)
Maybe marketing mainly promoted podcast / 1-1 service / job board (or people reached by marketing efforts mainly converted to users of these services)
See screenshot from the full report for extra context on engagement hours, unique visitors & subscribers:
Again, great work overall. I’d be really curious to hear any quick thoughts anyone from 80k has on this?
Hey Cillian — thanks so much for a really thoughtful/detailed question!
I’ll take this one since I was the only staff member on marketing last year :)
The short answer is:
Marketing ramped up considerably over the second half of 2022. Web engagement time grew a lot more in the second half of 2022 as well — if we just compare Q3 &Q4 2020 and 2022, engagement time grew 50% (rather than 10%).
But that still doesn’t look like web engagement time rising precisely in step with marketing investment, as you point out!
We don’t know all the reasons why, but the reasons you gave might be part of it.
There are five other reasons I want to mention:
marketing didn’t focus on engagement time
people we find via marketing seem less inclined to use our advice than other users
there’s a headwind on engagement time
site engagement time doesn’t count the book giveaway
2020 was a bumper year!
The long answer...
It’s true that there’s only a 10% rise in engagement time between 2020 and 2022.
The main thing going on here is that marketing investment didn’t rise until the second half of 2022 — I spent a while trying out smaller scale pilots. So the spend is very unevenly distributed.
If we compare just Q3 and Q4 (i.e. Q3 and Q4 2020 with Q3 and Q4 2021 and Q3 and Q4 2022), there was a 6% fall from 2020 to 2021, and then a 59% rise from 2021 to 2022, resulting in an overall 50% rise from 2020 to 2022!
But our marketing budget still rose by a lot more than 50% — so what’s going on there?
I’ll start out with the reasons you gave then add my own:
Yeah I don’t exactly know how the price of finding new users increases, but we should probably expect some diminishing returns from increased investment.
I think this might be a smallish part of it — I’ve noticed an effect where if the email we send on the newsletter is itself full of content, people click through to the website less than if the newsletter doesn’t itself provide much value.
I don’t think this can account for tons of what we’re seeing, though, just cos I don’t think the emails work as a 1:1 replacement for 80k’s site (I can’t really imagine there being much of a ‘substitution effect’ here).
I think this might be a pretty big part of what’s going on.
There does seem to be a significant ‘lag time’ from people first hearing about us and people making an important change to their careers (about 2 years on average) and I think there’s often a lag before people get really engaged with site content, too.
Also, bear in mind that because of what I said about the ‘unevenness’ of growth from marketing, people who found out about us this year are mostly still really new.
Yep, I did put some resources directly towards promoting the podcast, and a much smaller amount of resources towards directly promoting 1-1 (about 7% of the budget as a whole, and probably more like 10% of my time). So this could be (a small) part of what’s going on.
There are five other main things I think explain this effect:
Marketing didn’t focus on engagement time
My focus was really on reaching new users, rather than trying to get people to spend time with our content.
For example, last year I spent almost zero effort and resources on trying to get people who already knew about 80,000 Hours to engage with stuff on the site.
People who find out about us via marketing are, on average, less interested in our advice
I talked about this a little bit in my post that you linked.
I think this is probably a pretty big factor here!
There’s a headwind on engagement time, i.e. engagement time by default seems to go down over time
We think this is because, e.g.:
Articles that were last updated longer ago are seen as less relevant by search engines and deprioritised
Things we wrote become out of date and less useful to people
There might be some broader internet trend where people are spending more time on social media and less time on individual websites
Our current metric doesn’t incorporate engagement time from reading the books in the book giveaway
However, we are looking into including it in future reporting!
My (still ongoing) analysis of survey results about the book giveaway suggest that this engagement time is at least tens of thousands of hours, possibly >100k hrs.
(For context, our average monthly engagement time since Jan 2021 is about 8,000 hours (ha!)).
2020 was weird
We saw a very large spike in traffic in early 2020 — partly because we had content on COVID when many places didn’t, and partly because of the broader trend where tons of sites got a lot more traffic as people were staying home and spending more time online.
So 2020 might be an “inappropriate benchmark” or something like that.
Okay I hope that gives you an insight into what I think is going on here! Sorry for length :)
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 :) )