Mediahuis Nederland - Same engagement idea, better results with Contribly
Mediahuis Nederland (MHNL) have various news brands under one same umbrella. For their numerous local news brands, reader engagement is a priority, especially for their editorial team. Their aim is to increase page views, time spent on page and most of all reader loyalty.
Before they started using the Contribly newsroom tools, direct engagement was done manually. Here is how they revamped their already successful work into even better results.
Topline numbers:
Reader engagement before Contribly was very manual and time consuming - here are the result from MHNL’s first test:
Instant uplift: 4x the time spent on page compared to the same reader call-outs the previous year
< 2x the time spent on page than their average articles.
Increased page views by 6x.
7500+ likes and shares
Huge amounts of editorial team time saved and reader 1st party data collection
Readers want to see their content and engage with others’.
Reader engagement is a priority for Mediahuis Nederland and their 5 hyperlocal brands. Their first use-case for Contribly? Their annual Autumn mushroom photo competition. But this time all reader’s photos are published, and everyone can like and share their favourites.
They discovered readers preferred exploring, liking and sharing everyone’s photos vs simply seeing the winners.
How Contribly addressed the challenge
Before Contribly, The 5 hyperlocal news brands did an annual autumn photo competition. Readers best mushroom photos. A theme that works very well in that part of the world.
In the past, the editorial teams had a very big manual job, to collect and sift through hundreds of readers entries. There were only able to publish the winning photos as publishing hundreds of entries was too much work for little reward.
This year, using Contribly's newsroom tools and the instant publishing widgets, they were able to show off their whole community’s fantastic photos. In addition, they could get readers to like (or vote for their favourites).
How Mediahuis Nederland saved time and increase engagement
The editorial team created a call-out in Contribly which took under 5 minutes to set up. This call-out provided the team with easy to use, copy & paste widgets. The upload widgets were pasted into their website and apps. Readers could easily upload their high quality photos, their personal information, agree to all terms and conditions and tick a box to give the news brands licence to use all of this content - no more emails into a generic inbox or back and forth.
All these photos, came into the Contribly hub, a moderation and verification tool that allowed journalists to approve the content for publishing. All the approved contributions would be published on their website via the copy & paste engagement gallery. This gallery, appearing on many articles, instantly showed approved contributions as they came in. Readers could also like and share their favourites.
In the past, publishing all the content wasn’t possible, and readers engaging with each others’ even less so. The team learnt that readers were just as open to engaging as entering the competition.
The likes feature in the engagement gallery includes a counter, which meant readers could also view the most liked and see who was winning, or the best according to their peers.
Over 7500 likes were counted across the entries.
“Our first mushroom photo gallery with Contribly had over three times the average page views of a normal article and doubled the average time readers spent on the page. People weren’t just looking — they were contributing and engaging with each other’s content.”
DeGooi-en Eemlander’s page views and time spent on page results before and after Contribly.
An increase in page views, time spent on page, and two-way engagement with readers.
With Contribly, Mediahuis Nederland moved from scattered, hard-to-manage reader submissions to a streamlined, newsroom-wide UGC workflow. Engagement skyrocketed — mushroom and summer photo galleries drew triple the average page views, doubled time-on-page, and kept audiences interacting on their own platforms.
What was once a manual, clunky process is now a fast, frictionless way to turn reader contributions into publishable stories.
Highlights from the process:
On-platform engagement focus – By hosting UGC galleries and call-outs directly within their own sites, Mediahuis Nederland shifted interactions away from third-party platforms like Facebook and onto their owned digital properties, increasing recirculation to other stories and keeping readers engaged longer.
Embedded, no-code integration – Contribly’s embeddable widgets and galleries allowed journalists to add call-outs directly into the middle of articles without developer help or complex CMS changes. This lowered the barrier for contribution by keeping the form on-page, rather than sending readers to an external link or email address.
Improved editorial workflow – Contribly replaced a legacy UGC process that Melle described as “the seventh circle of hell” due to its poor user experience. With Contribly, the newsroom gained a clean, intuitive interface where journalists could quickly select form templates meet all legal and GDPR requirements, manage submissions, and publish galleries.
The results:
Significant traffic uplift – The “Mushroom” photo gallery achieved 2,196 page views, compared to the average free article’s 660 page views on DeGooi-en Eemlander. That’s over three times more traffic than a standard piece of content.
Higher engagement time – Readers spent an average of 90 seconds on the mushroom gallery, more than double the average time on page for a free article (39 seconds). This suggests that participants and viewers stayed to browse multiple submissions and interact with the gallery.
Year-on-year improvement – In 2023, the mushroom gallery using Contribly outperformed the previous year’s version (which used an external tool) by 78% in page views (2,196 vs. 1,234) and dramatically increased time-on-page (90 seconds vs. 22 seconds).
Ongoing reader participation – Seasonal galleries such as the mushroom and summer photo competitions consistently attracted hundreds of submissions and generated mutual engagement, with readers “liking” each other’s photos. This reinforced the community feel and encouraged repeat participation.
Workflow efficiency – Previously, running a gallery required awkward processes — emailing submissions, manually uploading to an external platform, then linking out from the article. Contribly enabled in-article call-outs, instant moderation, and automatic gallery creation, reducing production time and eliminating the need for external hosting.
“We didn’t have the manpower nor the expertise to build something like this ourselves, so I was more than happy to work with Contribly instead of reinventing the wheel. I was delighted when I saw Contribly was exactly what I thought it would be — easy to use, flexible, and perfect for embedding directly into our articles.
It’s already keeping readers on our platform, getting them to contribute, and engaging with each other in ways we couldn’t do before.”
Don’t just take our word for it, watch the case study video:
Since introducing Contribly, Mediahuis Nederland has transformed the way its regional brands connect with readers, turning photo competitions like “mushrooms” and “summer memories” into high-traffic, high-engagement stories that triple page views and double time-on-page.
By replacing clunky, slow tools with a journalist-friendly UGC platform, their newsroom now captures, curates, and publishes reader contributions in minutes, keeping audiences on their own platforms and strengthening community ties.
If your newsroom is still wrestling with scattered submissions, outdated tools, or missed engagement opportunities, it’s time to change that. Fuel your stories with UGC — without the chaos. From submission to story, instantly publishable. Discover how Contribly can streamline your UGC workflow and turn your community’s voices into stories that resonate. Get in touch and let’s discuss your reader engagement plans.