In February 2016, HighWire Press Inc. and TrendMD announced a partnership aimed at increasing the discoverability of HighWire publishers. The past 6 months have shown this partnership to be a huge success. In the month of June alone, HighWire publishers saw a 4.11% lift in traffic. Since the beginning of the HighWire - TrendMD partnership, traffic has been increased by 1.36 million additional article views, 272,000 of which came from new visitors. Links to recommended additional content direct new visitors to HighWire publishers as they read articles on the more than 2,500 scholarly sites across the TrendMD network.
Publishers were encouraged to use TrendMD for free initially, earning credits every time a visitor clicks on one of the links to an external site. (One credit is spent every time a new visitor is acquired from an external site.) Most publishers got a traffic increase of approximately 4% or more using only their earned credits (see the graph, “Distribution of Traffic Increases across Highwire Publishers (June)”). Publishers can continue to use TrendMD for free, but they also can achieve greater increases in traffic by purchasing additional credits. TrendMD’s Professional and Enterprise Plans not only provide more traffic credits to spend per month, but also give the publisher the ability to promote or sponsor specific content on external sites; a newly launched journal, a collection, or just articles published within the last 2 years, for example.
The TrendMD Sponsorship Program was created to give publishers a sense of the traffic boosting potential, and a means to experiment with using TrendMD as a strategic tool to achieve their goals. Publishers in this program saw an average of 9.38% increase in traffic over just one week, compared to a 3.35% average weekly increase in these same publishers before the program (See the graph, “Widget lifts traffic, Sponsorship program boosts traffic even higher”).
To date, 21 HighWire publishers, and 156 journals have installed the TrendMD widget and are benefiting from this partnership with another 61 publishers currently being onboarded. HighWire publishers already taking advantage of TrendMD’s benefits include multidisciplinary journals like PNAS, BMJ, and AAP, as well as more specialized sites like JBJS and the Journal of Immunology.
This partnership benefits HighWire, its scholarly publisher customers, and all TrendMD users in a number of ways:
- HighWire can offer an enhanced suite of services to their publishers by partnering with TrendMD.
- Publishers on the HighWire platform benefit through increased discoverability of their content: more people are reading their content and more new visitors are directed to their sites.
- Users across the TrendMD network of over 2,500 sites benefit by the increased number of publishers and expanded volume and variety of content that is now discoverable.