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Semafor has launched, let's take a look! What can we find out about their site besides the fact that their designer *definitely* likes FT? ...Permalink On twitter.com
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They are set up to have a Progressive Web App, and are generating their front end with Next.js. Good sign that they are with the times, moving to Next.js static site generation is pretty common practice among modern sites and news orgs.Permalink On twitter.com
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We can also see in the code that they are setup with three Chrome origin trials. Which ones? We don't know. But interesting! Also notable that they seem to have a very basic ad tech stack setup, but put a pin in that, we'll get back to it...Permalink On twitter.com
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They seem to be running some accessibility, but perhaps incidentally through reuse of open source stuff. There are somePermalink On twitter.com
aria-props and Next.js's route announcer, but the alt tags seem more focused on SEO and there is not the full compliment ofariastuff I'd expect...
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They seem to have a very basic Google Analytics setup and are leveraging Google Tag Manager. Nothing particularly interesting or unique, though their GA setup seems to be more modern than most, which is good...Permalink On twitter.com
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But let's get back to ads! Semafor is using Google Ad Manager. I don't see any ads on the home page, and neither the home page or the article page leverage header bidding. They also don't have an ads.txt or are declaring support for GPC...Permalink On twitter.com
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While the ads setup right now is pretty basic, we can see a few interesting things. They have a complex behavioral data collection CDP called Snowplow that they are running. It looks like Snowplow has an open-source version - github.com/snowplow/Permalink On twitter.com
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Unclear if they are using the open source or paid version. Interesting to discover during the code analysis that Snowplow is apparently built on top of Piwik open source code tho docs.snowplow.io/docs/contributing/copyright-license/ ...Permalink On twitter.com
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Unclear why it is the case, and I see this from responders as well, but it seems like their ad tech setup is pretty fragile at the moment. It isn't working at all for some people and is broken on my mobile device...Permalink On twitter.com
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What matters to Samafor as an ads business? Let's take a look in their single ad request on their article page. Performance is clearly a priority, they are leveraging Single Request ad mode and making one ad request to get all (4) ads on the page...Permalink On twitter.com
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It's unfortunate that they aren't doing any async work at all here, because if that first ad call fails, they all do. But on the flip side, time to first ad on Chrome on my Mac is under 200ms, so it seems likely their launch priority is speed. Which is smart! ...Permalink On twitter.com
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Ad slots vary depending on length of article, but no side bar therefore no sidebar ads. Just header, footer & X number of ads in the middle of the article, all setup as wide banners. Ads seem general, not a ton of advertisers yet and intentionally or not, one brand per page.On twitter.com
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All the ads appear to be Direct Sold, according to GAM markup. All ads appear to be custom to the site. In fact, really interestingly, all the ads I am seeing are *image only*. They are not running any "pixels" nor do I see video in-banner.Permalink On twitter.com
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Gonna assume that these are specifically launch sponsors and Semafor managed to swing the most basic ads for now in order to make the launch site as fast and clean as possible. Hard to imagine image-only ads with no 3rd party tracking is sustainable however...Permalink On twitter.com
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Found the GAM ID and it appears to be unique. Semafor isn't sharing GAM accounts with anyone, a pretty good call but less common these days than it used to be. Their GA account also appears to be only their own...Permalink On twitter.com
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Also worth noting that the Next data manifest places both GTM and the Snowplow CDP to fire after the first Interactive event, clearly someone understands Core Web Vitals over there...Permalink On twitter.com
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Very interesting that all their images seam to be served by Sanity (sanity.io/) which implies to me that this may be the underlying CMS they are using. Either that or they are using it to manage images, possible but unlikely.Permalink On twitter.com
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I'm not familiar with Sanity as a platform, but it repeatedly emphasizes on their website that it is doing a tracking around user interaction with content. Also interesting that it has a lot of eCommerce hookups...Permalink On twitter.com
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MorningBrew Hey Ryanbarwick is Sanity still the CMS you are using over there?Permalink On twitter.com
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Anyway, back to ads. What are they sending to Snowplow? Fingerprint-style data. Cookie availability. Basic contextual. Also what looks like multiple IDs? Unclear, some of these props I just don't recognize.Permalink On twitter.com
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Semafor's ad payload is mostly contextual, but we can see a little about how they think about the schema of their site here. Site sections are tagged asPermalink On twitter.com
verticalsand the author is also sent in as a targeting param.
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I see a lot of folks saying there is no consent mechanism in place. I wonder if it is because they aren't running anything that connects data with third parties? Def worth noting that looking at their cookies says that Sanity is setting Osano CMP cookies. baekdal/1582379703389736960Permalink On twitter.com
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However, they are using live Twitter embeds and without a consent API (assuming that is lacking, I haven't checked in EU myself), Twitter may be incorrectly collecting user data...Permalink On twitter.com
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Also, as noted by baekdal here, even if they think a low footprint of tracking is enough to make it so they don't have to have a consent management tool or signal: if they are using GAM, Twitter embeds and YouTube embeds they need *something*. Chronotope/1582391684322643968Permalink On twitter.com
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Also interesting that Semafor's videos are entirely on YouTube, and spread across two channels: youtube.com/channel/UCtB4ylCuQW0ue8ACIsHmD1w/videos and youtube.com/c/semaforxPermalink On twitter.com
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Their main channel doesn't have a ton listed, and doesn't have a named URL yet, with most videos looking unlisted. This implies to me that video monetization isn't a priority for Semafor, except maybe event sponsorships.Permalink On twitter.com
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(double checked and yeah, no TCF API and no UI to handle GDPR. No CCPA code I see either, but CCPA requires a number of readers in CA which they prob don't have yet, so nothing forcing them to implement it... *yet*)Permalink On twitter.com
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There's no verification, viewability, brand safety stuff in place beyond GAM basics for ads. This follows that it is likely that they have some launch sponsors who aren't concerned about the usual ad tech details. That can't last however and look here...Permalink On twitter.com
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Semafor is still hiring for its lead on the business side - boards.greenhouse.io/semafor/jobs/4050240005 I dunno. I understand the inclination to launch a fast site with a low footprint and get audience first then put in ads later but also... outside of Facebook... that hasn't really worked?Permalink On twitter.com
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Personally I find it very discouraging that Semafor would launch basically without a business leader. It implies to me that there is not a clear ads strategy and therefore no complete business plan for the company to be sustainable...Permalink On twitter.com
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This isn't exactly new thinking from a news startup. Basically exactly what Vox did initially if I remember correctly. & plenty of others. It also means however fast and sleek the website is right now, it won't stay that way. Inevitably they are going to load on *some* ad tech.Permalink On twitter.com
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And considering London is among their target three launch focuses for their business I'd think that *some* GDPR compliance would have been part of the launch. The experience we have of the website today will fundamentally & significantly change in the near future.Permalink On twitter.com
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On the speed advantage? It is high. There's almost no 3p scripts, so that's nice. For some reason their nifty spinning globe on the homepage is this fun gif, instead of a video file which would prob save some kbs.Permalink On twitter.com
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Their biggest obstacles are stuff that tends to be native to React and Next.js, problems that block their first contentful paint and put their Time to Interactive surprisingly high, even though they are using hydration.Permalink On twitter.com
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A check of some of their pages on web.dev, especially the home page, shows a very high time to first interactive, which will absolutely impact their analytics and time on page numbers, since those appear to be aim to be loaded after that event.Permalink On twitter.com
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The least performant thing on their site is Google Ad Manager because of course it is. When will Google tire of its own tools calling out how terrible its own tools are?Permalink On twitter.com
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But these are all minor matters. In its current configuration Semafor outperforms most news websites on all the metrics. But that's the advantage of not running what their eventual full ad tech stack is likely to be...Permalink On twitter.com
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A few notes on SEO. Semafor appears to list its reporters emails and Twitter in metadata. It has the full set of Twitter and Facebook OGPermalink On twitter.com
metaproperties. However, it is missing some major SEO tactics...
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The biggest one, the lack of Schema dot org JSON-LD, tells me that they either have intentionally decided that they're not going to play to Google, or they simply didn't prioritize getting an expert on this stuff to take a look at the site. That's a major missing chunk of SEOPermalink On twitter.com
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I suspect that failing to do that is likely linked more to their lack of a business owner reporting to the CEO who might prioritize such matters than an intentional strategy...Permalink On twitter.com
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They are also lacking more advanced tactics that are pretty typical for most news sites, like the OGPermalink On twitter.com
articlenamespace which should absolutely be here.twitter:creatorshould be there as well...
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And I find it out that even though they are somewhat out of vogue thePermalink On twitter.com
metatags fordescriptionandkeywordsare missing from what I can see. At least they got canonical...
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They have a sparse sitemap which doesn't seem to list their newsletter issues? They have sent some, so I have to assume either an accident or they plan to force users into subscribing to access that content and not make it easily available on the web. semafor.com/sitemap.xmlPermalink On twitter.com
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Also Semafor has no RSS feed as far as I can tell. :(Permalink On twitter.com
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If they have a social media person... that person appears uninterested in Reddit - reddit.com/domain/www.semafor.com/Permalink On twitter.com
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Overall, this site is pretty basic. In fact, surprising in how basic it is. I suspect this is a focus on having a site that is fast, clean, and easy to use on launch. But at the end of the day it tells us little of what it might eventually become.Permalink On twitter.com
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If I think of something else I'll thread it. Best of luck to Semafor! I really hope they have a real business plan and not just editorial ambitions and a vague hope to turn that into traffic that will somehow translate into ad dollars, which is sorta what this looks like.Permalink On twitter.com
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Oh... one other thing! This subtle alteration of images to add weird text on top at random places is *annoying* and sometimes unclear (see first ex). It should note in the captions that the image is modified and state the modification in the alt property. Also, consistent tone?Permalink On twitter.com
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Like... look here? On a glance it looks like the overlay text might be an actual sign IRL in the photo? It would prob be good to elaborate on the text to make it clear that the image is a modification. Think about the sharing context please.Permalink On twitter.com
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Response from Semafor added on to the thread, I have a reply comment and question below in response to that tweet - Justin_B_Smith/1582402668815089664Permalink On twitter.com
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