ScienceAlert began modestly as an aggregator of press releases from Australian research institutions and companies. Today, it has more than 15 million readers every month, 752,000 Instagram followers, 9 million Facebook followers, 92,000 Twitter followers and is known for the accuracy of its original content.
In short, it is the second most-visited science website in the world.
A key driver of this evolution is CEO Fiona MacDonald, who joined straight from university in 2007, and became CEO 10 years later.
As a teenager growing up in Alice Springs she loved observing the natural world, which led her to study science at university. During her honours project in molecular biology, she realised that although she loved science, she wasn’t too keen on doing it.
“I realised that I hated working in a lab,” she told The Brilliant.
She decided to swap pipettes for publishing. In 2007, she completed a graduate diploma in journalism. To fulfil the internship component of the course, MacDonald sent a speculative email to ScienceAlert.
To MacDonald’s delight, Chris Cassella, the former Microsoft programmer who had founded ScienceAlert just six months earlier, was happy to take her on as an intern.
After completing her internship, MacDonald stayed at ScienceAlert until 2009, when she left to become assistant editor at Cosmos magazine, where she won Young Journalist of the Year at the 2010 Publishers Australia Awards.
At the same time, ScienceAlert was becoming more ambitious, shifting focus from Australian and New Zealand press releases to covering international science news stories.
By 2012, when MacDonald was drawn back to ScienceAlert to work as a writer, about half the site’s content was original. By the time she became CEO five years later, almost all the content was original.
Recipe for success
Today ScienceAlert features original content combined with some carefully selected syndications and publishes an average of eight stories a day, reaching millions of readers every month.
“We still love to promote Australian science, but we now have a large, international audience and we cover anything important happening in the science world, from live coverage of rocket launches to features on important trends in health care.” MacDonald says.
In July, we had more than 15 million readers and 38% were under 34.”
Crucial to its success was an early decision to set up a Facebook page. “I remember Chris saying we had to get a business page because in the future everyone would be getting their news on social media. And I said, ‘Why would anyone come to Facebook to look at news, Chris?’” she recalls with a laugh.
The Facebook page became very, very popular,” MacDonald says. “We got to a million fans quite quickly because no-one else was really doing it at the time.”
Today, the ScienceAlert Facebook page has more than nine million followers. Chris Cassella has stayed on as Chief Technical Officer of the company, to make sure the site is at the cutting edge of Google and web trends. Now, more than half of ScienceAlert’s traffic comes through a mix of Google Search, Google News and Google Discover.
Creating strong content was another vital building block. In addition to daily news offerings, ScienceAlert began producing more ‘evergreen’ content, such as explainers and topic pages, which generated more Google-driven traffic.
This cemented ScienceAlert’s brand as a reputable source, MacDonald says. “If people google topics like ‘what is a black hole?’ and ‘what is the microbiome?’, and it’s your site appearing often enough, you become the leader in that space.”
Focusing on accuracy and reliability has been central to MacDonald’s role as CEO. The sources for each story are carefully scrutinised, and every article is independently fact-checked. In 2017, MacDonald hired an experienced science journalist Signe Dean as Managing Editor to oversee editorial quality.
Another key to success has been productivity. ScienceAlert has built a reputation for accuracy and integrity, and produces about 40 stories a week, with a full-time staff of 10.
Finally and crucially, ScienceAlert knows its audience. “Those mind-bending quantum physics and weird space stories that you think no-one understands? People love them,” MacDonald says.
Knowing what works is fundamental to engagement, but recognising what doesn’t is important too. For ScienceAlert, that was video. After a few forays into video production, MacDonald and her colleagues realised the pay-off wasn’t worth the money and time.
“We realised quickly that the business model would be better served by us writing regular articles instead. Especially since I’ve taken over, our business model has been very much focused on our strengths.”
After early partnerships with several Australian universities, ScienceAlert is now fully funded by display and native advertising on the site. “It’s a simple strategy – the more quality, relevant content we write, the more money we make,” says MacDonald. “But throughout a tumultuous period for online media, we’ve now been profitable for several years.”
Onwards, upwards
While ScienceAlert has evolved from its 2006 roots, there’s still plenty of room to grow, MacDonald says. Better branding is “probably our biggest goal for the next year. We’ve achieved so much success and beaten so many mainstream sites, but most people still don’t know what ScienceAlert is or what we’re about.”
Part of this brand boost is more attention on features and investigative pieces. All stories will remain free, too – it’s a big part of MacDonald’s belief that everyone with internet access deserves accurate, quality science content.
And it’s the people who write and produce that content for ScienceAlert that MacDonald treasures most. Even prior to COVID-19 the mostly Australian-based team was working remotely, with one writer in the US and one in the UK.
“I’m probably proudest of our awesome team. When I started at ScienceAlert, it was really just me and Bec Crew, who’s now a senior editor at Nature Springer, running the site. Now we have 10 on staff – we’ve doubled in size since I took over as CEO.
We’ve found our feet. We’ve found our audience and worked out what it is they like. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a science degree from Harvard or you’re living in rural area in India, or just trawling for cool facts on your way to work – everyone should have the same access to the same quality science information. The fact that we’ve been part of the growth and popularisation of science is something I am really proud of.”
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Note: Science Alert always want to hear from scientists and build relationships with cutting-edge researchers. But they only cover peer-reviewed research not speculative announcements of new research grants.
Article by Bel Smith
Photo credit: Photo supplied
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