It’s May! We’re somehow already halfway through the year. Wild! 

Over the past month the team has been making meaningful improvements to the site experience, building out a unique storytelling experience, and learned a lot about our readers. 

Want these updates as soon as they drop? Subscribe to our RSS feed. Questions?  Reach out to hello@restofworld.org. Let’s dive in.

What we’ve been up to 🚀

Skype

We spent the better part of April building out a nostalgia-filled experience celebrating the early days of Skype and internet communication. This was a true cross-team collaboration between editorial, product, and audience, shaped by interviews with dozens of our readers. Their personal anecdotes became the heart of the project, a tribute to the early feel of digital connection. If you haven’t shared it yet, now’s the time.

Mobile Share Tools

We’ve long debated whether Share Tools are actually helpful for readers. To gather more intel we’ve rolled out a simple experiment: share tools will now appear on mobile just below the endmark of an article, and they tap into your device’s native sharing tools using the Web Share API. 

We’re running this experiment for a couple of weeks and will be testing different placements and iterations while measuring views, clicks and referral links. If you like it, we’ll keep it, and if you don’t, we won’t.

Related Terms on Tag Pages

We extended our tag pages to include related tags. These are the tags that most frequently appear on stories that also include the current tag. We surface and link 6 tags, where each have appeared on at least 10 similar stories.

This is part of our broader push to make tag pages more useful to readers, and more discoverable through search.

Latest Stories audio icon

Anna added a small audio icon to our latest stories module on the homepage, showing when a story includes a Long Reads episode or AI narration. Happy listening.

Newsletter promo asset updates

It’s been a while (nearly 3 years) since our Global newsletter sign-ups got a refresh. Our designer, Joanne, created some stunning new visuals based on current phone case trends (she did actual research!) Think bold colors, playful designs, and weekly rotations. 

Product data and things we learned 📈

Recirculation

After a month of tracking performance, we’ve found that Read More Stories and Related Stories recirculation modules have the highest level of engagement on our site, and resonate most with our readers. As a result we’ve removed Most Popular from our rotation for now. You still view what’s Most Popular and trending with our readers when you visit our homepage. 

Audio

We launched AI narrations late last year. To date we’ve found that this feature resonates most with our readers from India, with roughly 53% of listeners coming from there. 14% of listeners come from the US in second place. While only a modest number of readers use this feature, they spend nearly three times as long with us compared to the average reader.

In case you missed it ✨

Joanne wrote a wonderful post about our recent brand color refresh. If you’re curious about the thinking behind the recent changes you should give it a read. 

Finally..

Our wonderful front-end developer, Lily, is leaving us to go on to do great things at the New York Times! Since joining in 2022, Lily has been pivotal in developing so many features and projects, from video experiences, Explainers pop-ups, our custom Glossary Blocks in WordPress, building a system to manage the promos and modules across the site, as well as building out our machine translations UI. She’s also been an absolute pleasure to work with: fun, witty, charismatic, and a super-talented software engineer. Lily, we are going to miss you ♥️