With a global audience of more than 350 million readers, Galvanized Media has a portfolio of some of the world’s most trusted health and fitness brands; including names such as Eat This Not That, Best Life, Celebwell, ETNT Health, Mind+Body, Travelicious and more!
Today we welcome Eric Zinczenko, President and COO at galvanized, to talk about the evolution of the publishing space, unlocking content analytics with Parse.ly, and working with XWP on long term performance improvements.
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Transcript:
Amit
Good evening, Eric, welcome to the show.
Eric Zinczenko
Thank you. It’s so good to be here.
Amit
To start with, what role would you say performance plays in the publishing world? And what led you into boosting performance for the Galvanized brands?
Eric Zinczenko
Yeah, I’d say for a digital publisher performance is absolutely critical.
“I would argue that performance is more important now than any other time in my 25 years in media”
Eric Zinczenko, President & COO of Galvanized Media
You’re probably wondering how I can say that.
Well, let’s consider the evidence: We are seeing the pace of all the current algorithm updates. And all the volatility that that brings is accelerating. We’re seeing the weight currently of Google Core Web Vitals playing a more important role. Page speeds, User Experience, these are all tied to performance—and today, we feel performance can absolutely impact success.
That’s what kind of led us down the road of performance and working with you.
We were reading the tea leaves, and we felt that performance would play a larger role in the competitive media landscape. We made a strategic and operational decision to obtain the highest page speeds we could, to also have the strongest core web vitals that we can possibly have.
And, you know, we engaged with you to make that happen. And now we’re enjoying igh performing sites.
Knowing our sites are optimised technically, really allows us to shift our focus to the task at hand—which is for Galvanized to make sure that we have the right content strategy and content delivery. So performance is important.
Amit
You’ve been using the content analytics tool Parse.ly for some time now. Can you talk a bit about what Parse.ly is and what it’s enabled you to do as a business?
Eric Zinczenko
So as as you described, Parse.ly is a content analytics tool that publishers can use to evaluate their content in real time. It helps answer questions like is the content performing? How many posts are live right now? Are consumers engaging? And what kind of time are you getting engagement? It also now allows us to look at our authors too and see if they’re performing.
I liken Parsley to an athlete wearing a heartrate monitor, where you can see it’s partially showing in real time during the event, the heart rate of the article posts and you’re having a chance to see whether your efforts are succeeding or failing and at Galvanized.
Eric Zinczenko, President & COO of Galvanized Media
It’s really important for us that we we don’t go by feel. We don’t go by our hunches. Like we really truly try to use data to set our strategy and direction and I would share with you that Parsley is the very first data metrics that we look in the morning among our executive team without fail
It’s really important for us that we we don’t go by feel. We don’t go by our hunches. We truly try to use data to set our strategy and direction, and I would share with you that Parsley is the very first data metrics tool that we look in the morning among our executive team without fail.”
Eric Zinczenko, President & COO of Galvanized Media
Amit
From analytics to hosting. Having the right WordPress host is also very important. galvanized trust WordPress VIP for its hosting services. What has been your experience with utilising WordPress VIP?
Eric Zinczenko
Yes, as an enterprise we’ve been very happy with WordPress VIP.
You know, my brother and I have always believed in open source platforms, so Galvanized has been on WordPress since the inception of the company in 2013.
Confidence was already high, and then when we have been growing traffic at the pace we have— for example, in 2021, we our traffic grew over 50%, we knew migrating to VIP for hosting was really the right call.
That’s the Because the IP is hosting a lot of the largest traffic sites in the world, and with our ambition to grow our traffic at Galvanized, it makes operational sense to continue the partnership and it’s been a strong one.
Amit
Galvanized has XWP’s maintenance package, receiving incremental technical improvements consistently. How’s it been seeing all these changes take effect, and performance improve over time?
Eric Zinczenko
Seeing all the technical enhancements and changes and performance, since first engaging is really gratifying.
Part of the operational mindset that we have at Galvanized is we subscribe to the ethic of constant improvement. What does that mean? It means that we never leave good enough alone. That means that the work is never done. And we really believe that there are ways that we can continue to incrementally refine and improve our business.
When you think about workflows, when you think about systems, when you think about process—those all evolve, and that’s even more true for digital technologies. So it’s nice to realise that we have arrived to a place where any performance improvements now will feel incremental. It’s because of all the heavy lifting that we’ve done already. And, you know, our work is far from done. But we’ve come a long way. And obviously, that feels great.”
Eric Zinczenko, President & COO of Galvanized Media
Amit
How have you found it working with a support team that’s distributed around the globe?
Eric Zinczenko
It works extremely well for Galvanized, and you know, the benefit of having a team across the globe is that when one engineer is leaving, another one might be coming on.
And, you know, it’s really brilliant because it does feel like you’d have more coverage throughout the day as issues arise.
When I was the CEO of another media company, we had all of our development and engineers centrally located all in one timezone. So when an issue came up, whether it was an outage or or some other situation, technical situation, you know, it felt like you had a lot of hands for a particular amount of time. And then you’re wondering like, Okay, where were we going from here
There’s great comfort for our enterprise, knowing that, you know, there’s a essentially around the clock coverage, and I can’t endorse it enough for Galvanized, we’ve been really happy with it.
Eric Zinczenko, President & COO of Galvanized Media
Amit
One thing that’s really interesting is that Galvanized is made up of some really experienced names of the publishing space. How’s the industry evolved? And where do you see the future going?
Eric Zinczenko
We see a future for digital publishing where brands with authority that publish, well researched and factual content backed by experts or medical advisory boards will win the day. So we really believe in that.
“We also believe that we’re going to see a future in digital publishing, where all of the algorithm updates that we’re seeing now are going to accelerate. And that may mean more increased volatility. That’s where performance plays even stronger role again, and I think that’s why it’s key.”
Eric Zinczenko, President & COO of Galvanized Media
We also believe that we’re bullish on service journalism, in digital media. And when we think about content that educates and encourages people to live their best life, that’s essentially the the mission of Galvanized so you know, we really believe in that so we’re very hopeful for the future of digital publishing and digital media. And, again, we think authority and expertise is going to win.
Amit
Eric, thank you so much for your time today. We greatly appreciate the opportunity to work with Galvanized, and look forward to many exciting things to work on together in the future.
Eric Zinczenko
It’s been fantastic. Thank you so much. This is really great.
Amit
Thank you, everyone. We’ll see you next time.
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