Marketplace’s most viral stories: March 2014

Shea Huffman Apr 1, 2014

Thoughts, disclaimers, bad jokes, etc.: This is our rundown of Marketplace’s top stories on Marketplace.org, Facebook, Twitter, reddit, LinkedIn, and Stitcher during February 2014. Our most popular story was a look at the struggles of the historically black college, Morris Brown College, a school that’s managed to stay afloat with only 35 students. Our other top stories resonated for different reasons: Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal’s ride-along with a paparazzi photographer drew viewers to our video segment with promises of genuine celebrity-sighting. And the novelty of a college professor choosing to live in a dumpster was too much to resist for social media users.

Most viewed on Marketplace.org: These were our most visited stories in March 2014, even if the article was posted before the month.

  1. How an HBCU with 35 students keeps its doors open
  2. Paparazzi photographer caught in the act!
  3. Thousand dollar house, million dollar view

APM: Marketplace on Facebook: Facebook posts are sorted by “total reach” on the Marketplace page, essentially the number of people who saw that post, because they like Marketplace on Facebook or saw the post through their friends. This list includes Facebook posts from March 2014.

1. Cars.com and the great newspaper experiment

2. Everything must go

3. How to unsend an email

Most traffic to Marketplace.org from Facebook

@MarketplaceAPM on Twitter: Defining success on Twitter can mean a few things. Knowing which article was clicked most is good for our main website, but lots of retweets lets us know we’ve got strong Twitter community that wants to share our stories. There’s a couple of different categories that mean success:

Most clicked tweet  

Most retweets

Most traffic to Marketplace.org from Twitter

reddit: Articles on reddit are sorted by which stories received the most upvotes, basically reddit’s equivalent to Facebook’s likes. reddit is a fickle beast, so you can’t really predict what will do well there, and often times its users will pick up on stories long after they were first published.

  1. Dynamic tolling, aka “Lexus Lanes,” appears to be a prestige good (Economics)
  2. Our accounts deficit is at its lowest point in 14 years (Politics)
  3. Ukrainian protests follow oligarchs to London (Foodforthought)

LinkedIn: Sorted by most traffic to Marketplace.org from LinkedIn. LinkedIn tends to like employment and technology focused stories, which explains why a story on hiring-practices was the top link last month, as well as why our piece on Netflix is still going strong on the site.

  1. Companies (still) want to know your SAT score
  2. What happens at Netflix when House of Cards goes live
  3. Why the Federal Reserve is vague about interest rates

Stitcher: Stitcher is one of our most popular audio platforms that allows people to share and listen to individual audio segments.

  1. Where to sell Alibaba’s treasure?
  2. That creepy eye on the back of the dollar bill, explained
  3. Wal-Mart will buy your used video games now

 

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