News Numbers

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The content's there but the data often isn't

Neil Heyside’s Oct. 18 story on PBS MediaShift about how newspapers should analyze their content by source type – staff-produced, wire/syndicated or free from citizen journalists – got me thinking about other ways content should be analyzed to craft audience-driven hyper-local and paid-content strategies.

 

Most news sites have navigation that mimics traditional media products - News, Sports, Business, Opinion, and Entertainment.   However, those types of broad titles don’t work well with digital content because people consume news and information in bits and pieces rather than in nicely packaged 56-page print products and 30-minute TV programs. 

 

Each chunk, each piece of content - story, photo, video, audio, whatever – should be tagged or classified with a geographic area and a niche topic so a news org can determine how much content it has for each of its highest priority audience segments – and how much traffic each type of content is getting. 

 
By geographic area I mean hyper-local.   East Cyberton, not Cyberton.  Maybe even more hyper - East Cyberton north of Main Street, for example, or wherever there’s a distinct audience segment that has different characteristics and thus different news needs and news consumption patterns.    

 

Similarly, news orgs need hyper-topic codes, especially for hyper-local topics.  The Cyberton community orchestra - not Classical Music, Music, or Entertainment.  If a news org is looking at web traffic data for “Music” it should know whether that traffic is for rock music or classical, and whether the content was about a local, regional, national or international group. 

 

Oh, and there’s one more aspect to this hyper-coding.  Content should be coded across the site.  Ruthlessly.  For example, to really understand whether it needs to add or cut coverage in East Cyberton, a news org needs to add up those East Cyberton stories in Local News, plus those East Cyberton Main St. retail development stories in Business, and those editorials and op-eds in Opinion about how ineffective the East Cyberton neighborhood council is, and….

 

Sometimes these hyper-codes are in content management systems but not in web analytics systems like Omniture or Google Analytics.  Knowing what you’ve got is great – but knowing how much traffic each hyper-coded chunk of content is equally if not more important.  

 

Whether the hyper-codes and thus the data are there only makes a difference if a news org is willing to take a hard, nontraditional look at itself.   The data may suggest it needs to radically change what it covers and the way it allocates its news resources so it can produce “relevant, non-commodity local news that differentiates” it, as Neil Heyside’s PBS MediaShift story points out.  

 

Heyside’s study of four U.K. newspaper chains has some interesting ideas about how a news org can cut costs but still maintain quality by changing the ways it uses staff-produced, wire, and free, citizen journalist content.  The news orgs in the study “had already undergone extensive staff reductions.  In the conventional sense, all the costs had been wrung out.  But newspapers have to change the way they think in order to survive.  If you’ve wrung out all the costs you can from the existing content creation model, then it’s time to change the model itself.”

 

If a news org doesn’t know, in incredibly painful detail, what type of content it has and how much traffic each type is getting, then it’s not arming itself with everything it can to mitigate the risks of making radical changes such as investing what it takes to succeed in hyperlocal news and in setting up pay walls.  Both are pretty scary, and it’s going to take a lot of bold experimentation – and data – to get it right. 

 

 

 

Two million users? Not enough...

Xmarks had lots of users but little engagement.  Apparently it forgot to figure out what the users needed or wanted.

From WebNewser:

"For the popular bookmark syncing service Xmarks, 2 million users was apparently not popular enough. Co-founder and CTO Todd Agulnick announced on the company blog Tuesday that, despite growing by 3,000 users each day, the startup was floundering and would shut down its service in 90 days....

Unfortunately, users who tried the system were looking for answers to questions rather than topical lists of sites."

Believing in time-on-site

A Sept. 12 Pew Center study found that "Americans are spending more time following the news than over the past decade."  Great news - or is this yet another misleading key performance indicator, as my previous blog post about time spent on site might suggest?

No - I like the Pew Center study.  It's a study of attitudes and feelings.  Good old-fashioned survey research (with all of its mind-numbing statistical sampling), is an essential component of web analytics.  Web site traffic data is audience behavior - the "what."  News orgs have to have attitudinal research to understand the "why,"how to attract audiences who aren't coming to their sites.

The data you get from Google Analytics or Omniture is enticing, isn't it?  (Work with me, here....)  Oh wow, we can track every click!  Ah, yes, we can track every click - but we can ONLY track clicks on OUR site, not on anyone else's. 

A time-on-site calculation can only be harvested for you if someone clicks on a page in your site and generates a page view that's counted by your Google Analytics/Omniture account.  Time-on-site is the time in between the first page clicked on YOUR site and the last page clicked on YOUR site. 

This means:

1.   If someone clicks on YOUR site and then immediately goes to another site (a bounce), it's not included by Google Analytics/Omniture in the time- on-site calculation.  It's like it never existed, time-on-site-wise. 

 It IS counted as one visit and as one page view.  So that means that all of those people who come to your site regularly (you know, the ones we really like) just to get the latest on a story aren't counted in time-on-site - and they should be. 

2.    If someone is on his/her third page in your site and opens another tab and goes to another site for twenty minutes before returning to your site and clicking on another two pages, those twenty minutes are included in time-on-site - and they shouldn't be. 

3.    The time a person spends on the last page of your site isn't counted.  If someone clicks through a few pages on your site and spends 15 minutes utterly absorbed in a story before leaving your site to go pay bills online, those 15 minutes aren't included in time-on-site - and they should be. 

So, time-spent-on-site is always either over- or under-counted.  And you'll never know which - this makes this metric utterly unreliable as an indicator of success or failure.  So you can't make a decision with this data because you can't know whether your action - a section added, the number of long-form videos reduced - caused time spent to go up or down.

More importantly, these days it really doesn't matter how much time people  actually spend on a news site.  What matters much, much more is whether people are engaged with the news, whether they believe news sites are an essential component to their lives, so much so that they come back repeatedly, rate a story with five stars, leave comments, click on an ad, and otherwise use the site.  It doesn't matter whether they spend three seconds or three hours.

That's what makes the Pew Center finding so exciting (surely you're still with me on how great web analytics is?).  People actually said they're spending more time with the news now than they did a decade ago.  It doesn't matter whether they actually are (!) - they believe they are. 

  I wish every news org could afford its own Pew Center-like attitudinal research study so it could track how engaged its own targeted audiences are (or aren't), and to understand how to get and retain new audiences.  The information wouldn't always be pretty, but at least it would be data that could make a difference.

Decision-making with data

Wow - a web analytics story in the New York Times!  And one that probably didn't spark mass hysteria by saying that looking at web traffic data is the end of journalism as we know it.  

Jeremy Peters' September 5 story, "Some Newspapers, Tracking Readers Online, Shift Coverage," nicely framed the issues about using web analytics to make decisions about coverage.  At one end you have journalists who completely ignore audiences and report whatever they want.  On the other there are those who "pander to the most base reader interests." 

This was one of the few mainstream media stories I've seen that recognized the new role that audiences have in informing - not dictating - news decisions. 

Actually what was the most interesting to me was that Raju Narisetti, the Washington Post's managing editor of online operations, said that he used "reader metrics as a tool to help him better determine how to use online resources....the data has proved highly useful in today's world of shrinking newsroom budgets." 

In other words, Narisetti didn't just look at overall site traffic numbers like total visits or unique visitors and say "Oh, that's nice," or "Whatever! I've got a paper to put out."  He had to cut his budget, he saw that long-form videos had little traffic compared to other types of content, and then he decided to cut "a couple of people" from that department.

Narisetti made the decision - the data didn't.  He used the data.  In my rather narrowly focused web analytics world that is a really, really big deal.  Data just wants to be useful.  Seriously.  If it could talk, it would say that it doesn't want to be any part of a daily e-mail "about 120 people in The Post's newsroom" get that lays "out how the Web site performed in the closely watched metrics - 46 in all."

Forty-six! 

For data to be useful you have to ask it specific questions that you know it can answer.  A metrics report won't tell you what department to cut, and by how much.  However, it could tell you what types of stories get the most and least audiences, and which story types appear to have growing or declining audiences.  You can also get indicators - such as the percent of long-form videos people watched to the end, rated and/or commented on - of whether you're engaging audiences.

Then the hard part - the decision - is up to you.

 

Number wars

What does the war in Iraq have in common with the war news organizations are fighting for their survival?

Nothing at all, unequivocally. 

However, I was struck by Owen Bennett-Jones' closing of his August 27 BBC story about the disparities in the reports of the numbers of civilians killed in Iraq since the war started in 2003: 

"It remains true that people tend to cite a number that reflects not their view of the quality of the research but rather their view of the war."

In other words, getting someone to use your numbers - your definition of success - is just as hard as getting them to change their thinking.

In the world of web analytics, people "tend to present the metric that's most likely to work in their favor. They're tracking the wrong way or they don't want to look at a particular set of data. They are wrongly using analytics as what [Robert Rose of Big Blue Moose] calls a Weapon of Mass Delusion....Worst of all, they are not learning to apply insight to action."

-- from "A Web Analytics Trap," by Jim Ericson, Information Management, August 13, 2010

Page views: bad metric #3

Why do news organizations persist in using total page views as a measure of success?  Perhaps because if you're afraid of numbers then you're even more afraid of bad numbers, or numbers that tell you that your site isn't as successful as you want.

As with unique visitors and time on site, page views is a deeply flawed metric for understanding how a news organization is growing and retaining audiences.  

If the number of page views goes up, it could be a good thing.  Or, it could be bad.

If page views go down, it could be a bad thing.  Or - you guessed it - it could be good.

We would all like to think that a soaring number of page views means lots of people are eagerly pawing through our sites reading everything that's written.  However, how many times have you gone to a site and clicked on, say, 12 pages, fruitlessly looking for something? 

This is counted as:

1.    One unique visitor
2.    One visit
3.    12 page views

And one dissatisfied person who may not come back.

The page views metric rewards the bad design and navigation that many news sites have (sorry).  Most news sites persist in using section titles that are the same as their legacy media product (e.g., "Local News," "Life"), leaving audiences - if they're so inclined - to have to click numerous times before landing on a story about a particular city or activity like gardening.   

Or, a site breaks up a story into multiple pages, which can be annoying to a reader and reduces the possibility the reader will read the entire story and rate it, e-mail it or leave a comment.  What could be counted as one page view with a comment is counted as, say, five page views. 

If a site is redesigned and readers can find what they want with fewer clicks, total page views will - should - go down. 

And, dynamic content, or content that changes on the page without the reader clicking anything - isn't counted at all.  Streaming stories, videos, widgets, Flash applications, podcasts?  One page view.

To truly grow, a news org must understand every action its audiences are taking on its sites.  These are challenging times that require news sites to experiment and try many different things.  Not all things will work, which means sometimes the numbers will be bad.  But - you guessed it - that's a good thing.  We have to know if something's not working so we can fix it. 

 

"A trend is a friend"

Someday I'll give up web analytics and move on to something real like pottery or something, but until then I'll keep fighting the good fight to get news orgs to stop using monthly unique visitors as an indicator of success.

It's tempting, I know, to count UVs because the number of monthly subscribers is the standard for print, and the number of people Nielsen says watched a program is the standard for TV. 

But technology has made everything different.  Strategy is more important than ever, and understanding audiences, not just counting them, is essential. 

UVs are counted by counting the number of cookies, or computers, that go to a site.  This means UVs are always significantly overcounted or undercounted. 

If one person uses three computers, it's counted as three unique visitors.

Conversely, a number of people going to one computer - for example, at a school or library - means that UVs will be undercounted.

Neil Mason, a web analytics guru who does some pretty thorough research for his clients, noted in a recent ClickZ column that UVs are usually overcounted.  

(So that's the reason why news orgs use total UVs - would they use this number if it were consistently undercounted?  Don't think so...)

Mason notes that while the UV metric is "particularly important for those sites that are dependent on advertising revenues as a major source of income,"  it "must always be treated with caution and never taken at face value."  

Believe me, it's rare to hear a web analytics expert use the word "never."

The advice from the ever-pragmatic Mason:  "A trend is a friend."   Analyzing significant increases or decreases over time will give news orgs the information needed to build audiences. 

(Trends are indeed friends, but don't even think about using counts of Facebook friends and Twitter followers!)

 

Mobile muddle

How do you measure mobile?  It's a mess, even for web analytics gurus like Judah Phillips at Monster.com, who said as much in an interview with IQWorkforce:

"The mobile space is interesting to me too, but it’s very much like traditional web analytics on smaller screens with some absolutely crazy data collection, sessionization, and visitorization challenges."

Huh?  Let's start at the beginning.

Just as millions of other people, I have a mobile phone.  However, I just discovered that I don't have a "phone."  I have a "device," or just simply, "a mobile."  That's right - "mobile" is now a noun. 

I guess the definition of "phone" is now limited to something on which you only make or take calls.  And, it turns out, even the lowest end mobiles - or lean mobiles - at least have texting capabilities.  (If you want to sound like a techie, use SMS, or short message service.  Sheesh.)

Up until last year I had a lean mobile with a camera.  I loved using the camera but didn't send photos to anyone because it would have cost me $15, just like that.  I didn't send any texts because each one made or received cost $0.20 each, which meant every time I got an unsolicited text from a company or an unknowing friend I was a little annoyed. It wasn't the cost.  It was just the principle of it all.  I neither wanted nor needed these texts, and I had no control over receiving them. 

I'm on a smartphone now, an iPhone 3GS, for no particular reason other than it sounded fun.  I'm paying $5/month extra to make or get 200 texts, and I've found texting pretty useful - so useful that if I find myself doing more than 200 texts/month I'll probably pay the AT&T rip-off unlimited-text fee of $20/month.  I've also been doing everything else everyone else does - reading news stories, tweeting, updating my Facebook status, checking in for flights, buying things.

And I have no idea whether I've been using mobile apps or the mobile web.

It turns out "There are 'three worlds' in mobile: apps, mobile Web and SMS. In the case of smartphone owners, they will use all three to varying degrees."  (From Internet2Go.net, March 2009.)

You know what "three worlds" means.  Three different sets of metrics.

And, guess what?  Apps are device-specific, which means there are different sources of metrics for iPhone apps (which, contrary to popular belief, hasn't taken over the world), BlackBerry, Palm Pre, etc. 

And....

Mobile web browsers (e.g., Safari on an iPhone) are also device-specific.    

And....

All of those mobile usage numbers from comScore, Ground Truth (a mobile measurement firm) and the like only measure one mobile world, the world of mobile web browsers.  They don't measure usage from apps.  And how many people use mobile apps rather than the mobile web, especially for Facebook and Twitter?  I dunno - a lot?

The mobile usage numbers may all be flawed, but they all do point to mobile's continuing rapid growth.  So, unfortunately, that means we've got to understand what new nouns like "sessionization" and "visitorization" mean.

    

Mobile app-mania

Is it just too mundane to talk about mobile application metrics when the iPad - touted as the savior of news media - has only been out a day?  Yeah, probably, but before I too get swept up in the frenzy of newness and coolness, I want to go on record noting that the total number of iPhone apps downloaded or purchased doesn't tell you anything about engaging audiences.  Ditto for iPad apps.

It must be true because I saw a story about how people don't use smartphone apps in the New York Times.  No, not in David Pogue's technology blog.  It was in the softy Sunday Styles section, right under a huge article about middle school boys using smelly body washes to get "masculinity in a spray can."

The key takeaway (of the smartphone story, that is): Most people have more shoes than iPhone apps.  They download a bunch of apps and even pay for some of them, but they don't actually use a lot of them. 

 "Since Apple launched its App Store in 2008, media, industry observers and Apple customers have bent over backwards to heap encomium after encomium on applications," Mickey Alam Khan, editor-in-chief of Mobile Marketer and Mobile Commerce Daily, wrote last week.  "Yet, for all the hoopla – 150,000 applications in the Apple App Store, 30,000 in Google’s Android Market, 50,000 in GetJar – not enough questions are asked of the efficacy of this mobile channel, either for content, marketing, retail or entertainment."

What questions should be asked?  The usual indicators of engagement - number of visits to an application per week or month, visits per unique user and the like.  Khan also wants to know "How many deletions each month and after how many visits?" and "Do users respond to images on applications the way they do on mobile sites?  Do they have the same patience for page load times, application versus mobile Web sites?" 

Unfortunately, Khan notes that the data just isn't there yet.  "Apple, Google and others of its ilk are asking retailers, publishers and brands to spend tens of millions of dollars on products created uniquely for their proprietary application stores.

"The least that application store owners can do to reward this marketer devotion is to offer data on an aggregate level....

"With each new mobile device’s launch, more hysteria is created around the content possibilities.  The Apple iPad’s debut has launched another round of application development, this time giving hope to publishers worried over the future of the printed book....

"Applications as the glue that creates stickiness to mobile device will be the name of the game.

"But is this simply an Apps Bubble or another viable mobile channel that can hold its own with the mobile Web? Only time and data will tell."

The right data, that is.

An ounce of Prevention

I exercise regularly and don't smoke, but I avoid reading Prevention.com. It's just too annoying to be reminded of all of the other "smart ways to live well."  When I see "by the editors of Prevention.com," I have this picture in my mind of a bunch of really healthy people popping out cheerful stories like "5 Vitamins Your Bones Love" and "10 Reasons You're Always Exhausted." 

Now I have another (annoying) vision, thanks to MinOnline's story about how well Prevention is using web analytics.  Of course a staff that is so pragmatic and probably always mentally alert would resist "going for the cheap link grab and traffic spike" - the junk food of web analytics.

I haven't been sleeping well because I think too much (the top reason people don't get enough sleep and are therefore exhausted), so I'll just plop in these two paragraphs verbatim from Steve Smith's MinOnline story, "At the Building Prevention.Com, Only The Abs Are Flat."

Prevention stays "on its own brand message and [courts] the kinds of audiences that it and its advertisers really want. 'We got back to engaging with our customer in the ways we knew they wanted us to engage with them,' says [vp/digital Bill] Stump. Fishing for any and all eyeballs and courting simple traffic spikes in the search-driven universe doesn’t pay off in the end. 'You get waves of traffic, but the tide goes back out and what are you left with?' Instead, by keeping to the needs of the 'core customer' in everything that goes out to syndication or into the e-mail newsletters, prevention.com is courting the people who tend to stay.

"Now, each big wave raises the sea level for all of prevention.com’s metrics, says Stump. In the last two years, overall page views climbed 60%. In the last year, the number of visits per user went up 12%. But it is the engagement metrics of which Stump is proudest. 'The number that warms my heart,' he says, 'is page views per visitor that are up 49%.' That means the new visitors are sticking with the site and drilling much deeper than they ever have before. 'In general, advertisers want an engaged audience. They want the metrics that show that people value your brand and come to you for something that is unique. We own natural health and fitness and beauty. We are the authentic voice.'"

 

Wasting time

Time spent on a site or a visit ranks right up there with total page views and monthly unique visitors as widely quoted metrics masking as indicators of success for news organizations.

No, it's not a crime to misuse a metric, but isn't a shame to waste your time on something that's not absolutely essential to your site's success? 

Plus, the way that time spent is calculated is flawed.  All web metrics are flawed somewhat, but time spent is really misleading.

More on the ugly methodology later - let's tackle time spent's uselessness first.  In other words, if the methodology were acceptable would time spent still be a key performance indicator?

Advertisers have always made decisions based on the level of engagement a news org's audiences have with its brand and content.  But both content and the ways people use and interact with content are different - and thus the way engagement is measured is different, too. 

In the past, time spent was an important measure of engagement for news orgs and advertisers.  People spent whole chunks of time with one medium or another.  Readership surveys measured time spent per day or per week.

Because these were surveys, time spent was based on self-reported information.  It was what people said they did vs. what they actually did.

But it didn't matter whether what people said matched with what they did.  What mattered was how engaged people felt.  People who reported they spent an hour a day with Monday's newspaper but actually only spent twenty minutes believed they spent a large chunk of time and attention with a news org.

In stark contrast, web advertising decisions depend on knowing actual behavior as reported via rows upon rows of numbers ruthlessly pouring out every second.   Among many other things, advertisers track the number of times their ads come up and are clicked upon. Sites and audiences are more niche and are highly segmented.   The algorithms for and definitions of "engagement" vary for every site and every company.  

Time spent just isn't a good indicator of engagement.  Someone who spends five minutes a day on a site, goes to five different stories each visit and adds comments twice a week is clearly more engaged than someone who comes onto a site for 30 minutes a week and clicks idly on a few pages while talking on the phone.    

How many times have you spent 30 minutes or so on a site, flipping and flapping through what seems like a million page views in a fruitless attempt to find something?  Maybe you spent 30 minutes in such a visit once - and never went back.

A news org's success in the long-term will be based not on how much time people spend on a site but what they do once they're there.

--------------

How Time Spent on a Site is Calculated

AOL analytics

In the late 1990s, "America Online" was the shiny new company everyone watched, feared and tried to copy.  Just "AOL" now, it's hardly as fresh or inspiring. With its new CEO, logos and use of web analytics to select the stories it covers and evaluating its reporters, has AOL once again become a news organization to watch?

AOL's announcement that it will employ "judicious use of Web-analytics software" sparked the expected flutter of coverage.  It's admitted to using data to inform (dictate?) news decisions, so you could be led to believe that AOL is adopting a true audience-based approach.  However, after reading the Feb. 22 story in BusinessWeek and the reactions gathered by Media Post News, it seems like AOL is still using a traditional advertising-based mass media strategy.  It's still trying to be all things to all people.  It's just using web analytics to decide what those things are.

"Audience growth and audience engagement have to be the things that we judge the most off of our journalist investments," AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is quoted as saying.  So far, so good. 

Armstrong also said that "brand ads should be a lot bigger on the Internet today," talking about how online advertising revenue should pick up.  But there was no mention about AOL's own brand strategy, something that would answer the question of "What is AOL?" for audiences and advertisers once and for all.  On which niches will it focus?  How much of its content will be unique and compelling enough to those niche audiences so that they'll come back regularly?

Patricia Handschiegel, who blogs as Daily Patricia, sums it nicely:

"The right approach to the content business is to KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE, or the people that come to your site, and create a product for THEM. AOL’s approach is clearly not centered on this....it’ll drive up page views and therefore, revenue but that’s not likely to last as the industry becomes more analytics savvy. Today, a million uniques with zero session times, high bounce rate and no repeat visitors isn’t seen as a sign of a lack of audience but in the not too distant future it will."

I haven't researched AOL myself, so I don't know if all of the details in the BusinessWeek and Media Post News stories really reflect what AOL is doing.  So I'll just note some some things news orgs should think about when using web analytics to inform news decisions and evaluate journalists.     

• Evaluating success (either a site's or a journalist's) by total page views doesn't work. A large number of page views may just indicate visitors got there by mistake or clicked around trying to find something.   Plus, dynamic content (Flash, etc.) will not be counted as page views. Page views can be a useful metric, but only when combined with other metrics - such as ratios - that give context. 

• Engagement can't be determined by web traffic or behavioral data alone.  Attitudinal research is essential to find out why or why don't people come to a site regularly, what they want and what they're not finding. 

• If journalists are going to be held accountable for web traffic and audience engagement will they also have control over the factors that drive traffic, such as design, navigation and marketing? Or will they just submit their stories and hope for the best?

• "AOL is even considering sharing a portion of quarterly profits with staffers whose work fetches the most page views."  BusinessWeek

How will traffic goals be set?  If journalists will be rewarded for generating "traffic" (however it's defined), will they be fired if they don't? Will the benchmarks or starting points - and the time journalists have to reach the required traffic levels - be based on whether a topic is already established or whether it's one a news org wants to nurture and grow because the topic is essential to achieving its strategy?

• "Tacked to the newsroom walls in AOL's downtown Manhattan headquarters are pages and pages of Web traffic data." BusinessWeek
  
  Uh, this would cause even me to shut down.  It's definitely not "judicious use of Web-analytics software."  Does AOL have a few key performance indicators that everyone understands and on which they can focus as a team?
  
  Software and reports don't make decisions; people do. Successful use of web analytics depends on the decision-makers understanding and using the information correctly.  If news orgs believe the success of their websites depends on being truly audience-focused then they must also ensure the analytical resources and processes are there as well.  

AOL may stumble again but at least it's trying something different.  I look forward to learning from AOL whether it succeeds or fails. 

Video metrics for everyone!

YouTube's become a verb and a household name, but I'll always see it as an organization that's brought metrics into the lives of the common people (those who have broadband Internet, anyway).  The "Most Popular" and "Featured Videos" are seen worldwide, sometimes garnering millions of views.  "Hey, did you see...." is usually accompanied by something like "...and it has x million views on YouTube!"

Number of views is great for little else other than bragging rights.  It's one of the  "famous" metrics (web analytics guru Avinash Kaushik's term) that "are staring you in the face when you crack open any analytics tool" but "barely contain any insight."

Yep, for anyone in the content business, number of views is right up there with hall of famers number of page views and monthly unique visitors.  

YouTube has pushed all of its account holders  - no matter how amateur - to use meaningful metrics. In March 2008 it launched Insight, its "video analytics tool for all users," along with some almost-preachy instructions on how to use metrics to get more people to watch your videos and, of course, come more often to YouTube.

The Insight tool allows you to track "community engagements" (there's that word again) in terms of ratings, comments, and favorites.   YouTube doesn't want you to settle for people just watching your video.  People have to show, in a measurable way, that they not only watched it but also reacted to it. 

At the very least people should give a star rating (one is bad, five is good).  Rating is easy, quick and anonymous.  Tagging a video as a favorite is the next rung.  And if they're really engaged, they'll leave comments. 

But, as anyone who's ever spent any time at all on YouTube knows, many comments are spam, obscene and irrelevant - just noise.  But the value of social media metrics is in looking beyond what James Kobelius in Information Management points out is an "often low and laughable" signal-to-noise ratio. 

Kobelius notes that "if you crawl, correlate, categorize, mine, and explore it with the right tools....[this unstructured information] can yield unexpected insights....The intelligence value of any individual tweet [or comment] in isolation is negligible....Intelligence emerges from the aggregate."

If you can stomach a few obscenities, look at this thought in Encyclopaedia Dramatica about YouTube view fraud and how the ratio of VPC, or views per comment, "is the most accurate way to determine if anyone" cares.  "A high VPC usually means view fraud has been committed." 

The example in ED shows that a video with 136,097 views and 3,529 comments has a VPC of 38.7, a low number that indicates this is a video "that people actually find funny."  The video with 296,413 views, 541 comments and thus a VPC of 547.9 is probably something nobody really cares about.

I calculated some VPCs from this week's "Most Popular" videos and came up with some numbers that I don't know what to do with yet.  To see if VPC can be used as a key performance indicator, I'll need to calculate VPCs and crawl through the cacophony of a variety of news videos.  VPC may never be  "famous," but it might be insightful. 

Always a bridesmaid, never a bride?

It's almost Valentine's Day, so let's muse again about what it means to be "engaged."  In this day of figuring out whether people will pay for web news, defining success by measuring engagement is more important than ever. 

It doesn't matter whether you love or hate a news organization if you're engaged with it - as demonstrated by behaviors such as going to the site frequently, contributing content, e-mailing a story, rating a video or paying a monthly subscription fee.

Many worthy people have come up with all kinds of complicated mathematical formulas for measuring and tracking engagement.  Nothing's stuck.  In other words, just because a number was produced ("Disaster!  Our engagement rating was 14 last month but our goal was 19!") doesn't mean site traffic and other key performance indicators move in conjunction with it.  A metric is just a number if it doesn't move up or down as a result of some action or mistake on your part. 

Although measuring engagement still eludes us, I hope news orgs will still adopt an engagement philosophy and an audience-focused culture that will guide the decisions that do lead to measurable results.

A philosophy still needs some definition.  I like this quote from Dave Smith, CEO of Mediasmith, a digital advertising agency.  The interview is in "Digital Engagement," a book by Leland Harden and Bob Heyman.

"Engagement is an unconscious tick of the mind that causes you to think differently about and notice a brand differently in the future."

In the same interview Smith also quotes Erwin Ephron, perhaps the "founder of modern media planning," as saying that "Media engagement and advertising engagement are very different things....Historically, media are measured by audience delivery.  Advertising is measured by response.  Engagement-based ratings would measure media by response."

In other words, it's not enough now just to put content out there and hope your audiences will like it.  Traditional audience research that produces various numbers for loyalty and satisfaction isn't enough either.  Audiences can't just tell you how they feel.  They have to show you.      

Twitter strategy revisited

It's been fun to, ahem, follow all of the rather serious Twitter research (isn't The Science of ReTweets just the best title?). The studies that seem to get the most attention are those that examine the ego-boosting or deflating number of followers - what's too many, too few or just right. 

"In Praise of Obscurity," Clive Thompson's column in the Feb. 2010 issue of Wired, states the obvious to anyone who's ever been in a class of 15 people and then in one that has 500: 

"Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote....Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting."

At his Twitter Boot Camp last June, Tim O'Reilly chided the New York Times, saying that "just using Twitter as an RSS feed for your site is a missed opportunity."  Twitter's supposed to be all about building communities by having two-way conversations between the followers and the following.

At the time I instantly agreed with him.  But Twitter is no longer an amusing recreational hobby.  It's now a business juggernaut - and that implies a company should use it tactically any way that it wants.

The NYT has 2.3-million-plus followers, is supposedly following a measly 193, and doesn't ever seem to retweet or respond to a follower.  But every tweet has a link to the NYT site.

The NYT doesn't claim it wants to be your friend and talk to you.  Its Twitter bio states right up front that the NYT is "Where the Conversation Begins."  It's not where conversations continue, are facilitated, passed on or anything else connected to being a personal relationship builder.

I do think news orgs must build closer relationships with their audiences.  But Twitter isn't - and shouldn't be - the only way to do it.   What is important, however, is transparency in how a news org is using its main Twitter handle.  If a news org is just not that into you, it should say so.

A Tablet Day thought

All the talk this week about Apple's new tablet has me picking up my Amazon Kindle and hugging it.  After all, it's real, it's here, and it didn't cost $1,000. 

I really love my Kindle, but the metrics side of me cringes every time I read an article from the Los Angeles Times, New York Times or New Yorker subscriptions that appear silently - magically - every day or every week and are always at my fingertips.  

News orgs complain about the pennies they get from each Kindle sub, but that's the least of their problems in the long run.  The bigger problem is that they can't track how many subscribers click on an issue, when they do it and what stories they read, if at all.   

This is just like the good old days!  A newspaper pumps out a seven-day home-delivered product and collects a few subscriber dollars so it can say it has a paying audience.  It then sells some ads based on a mass media theory (otherwise known as "spray and pray").   In other words, it has no idea of what works for subscribers.

Web sites give news orgs detailed information about what engages audiences.  The info is sometimes painful ("What?  No one's reading my story?"), but it's essential for survival today.  

For a reader, Kindles and tablets are great. What's great for readers should be great for news orgs, too, but only if they know why. 

Black + white = grey

Which of these things are not like the others?

a.    Black vs. white
b.    Mass vs. niche
c.    News vs. advertising
d.    Site-centric vs. person-centric
                   OR    
       Census server vs. audience panel data
e.    None of the above (all are alike)  

The answer is (d).  Really?

When I plunged into the huge world that is web analytics, I decided to focus on site/server-centric or census analytics, or the data you get from software like Google Analytics or Omniture.

After all, site-centric data gives you what people actually did.  The comScore or Nielsen data comes from panels of people reporting what they said they did. 

It makes sense that there are two different types of data, because there are two different needs:  Advertising needs overall site data that gives some demographic information and allows competitive comparisons, but the newsroom needs data that tracks traffic for every story in every section (otherwise known as "excruciating detail").

Here's the smug little chart I've been using in presentations.  (It got a nice comment from someone on Slideshare:  "The best way I've seen yet to describe the fundamentals of web data structures!")

Things might not be so left-side vs. right-side now.  comScore and other panel vendors claim they're now combining the best of both.  Josh Chasin of comScore asserts in Online Metrics Insider that its hybrid methodology is "helping to resolve what once seemed to be irreconcilable differences between two ways of counting....But this convergence doesn't mean there isn't still room for two distinct metrics disciplines....The function and purpose of these two data streams remains separate, and both are essential....panel data can make census server data better, and...server data can make panel data better." 

I think I'll still focus on census server data.  It's too overwhelming to go deep into the panel side when there's still so much to learn from the census side. 

However, I'll start following the evolution of hybrid measurement systems.  More data often just leads to more "so what" reports.  But we might be on our way to a better understanding of our audiences, which both the newsroom and the business sides desperately need.

Is your "in" crowd big enough?

Defining success in Twitter, Facebook and other social media services starts with identifying distinct niche communities based on shared interests and beliefs.  Each community member has different levels of participation and prominence.  And in each community there's an "in" crowd whose actions determine whether others stick around.   

How do you know who these influencers are and whether you have enough of them to keep a network alive and thriving? 

Success in social media depends on both listening and doing.  It's difficult to measure the listening part, but you can definitely measure how many people are doing something, and what they're doing. 

Success also depends on who is contributing.  However, a prominent person's mere presence doesn't mean he or she is an influencer.  A true influencer posts content, starts conversations, organizes meet-ups and otherwise engages community members.

For a metric to be useful, you need to have a starting point and a goal.  Setting a goal can start with a pure guess that you adjust once you have some data.  Or, your initial goal can be based on benchmarks from a source that makes sense for your strategy and objectives.

This eMarketer story, "Harnessing Active Brand Advocates," summarizes findings from a social media survey done by Synovate, a research company.  The findings can help you determine whether you have a healthy number of influencers.

The survey found that 26 percent of U.S. Internet users posted online ratings or reviews.  Twenty percent contributed to online forums.  Eighteen percent attended a meet-up that originated online; almost 6 percent took an active role in organizing one.   The numbers didn't vary much between men and women, but they did vary by age group, as you would expect.

It won't be easy to gather this info from all of the multiple accounts you have on Twitter, Facebook and other services.  Measuring social media is art and science grounded in a thorough knowledge and understanding of what and who makes a particular social network work.

Before even counting influencers, I'd start with coldly assessing whether your news org is in--or out.  What would it take to be in--and stay there?  Will it ever be possible? 

I'm not sure it's worth the time and resources for a news org to be in a network if it's not an influencer.  Does just being a follower help or hurt?  Or do community members feel insulted if they perceive a news org is just putting in a half-hearted, token effort? 

I suppose it would vary by community and news org.  Oh, great - that's one more thing to measure and track.

 

Twitter: new medium, new metrics

It's a new year, so I'm hitting the reset button on my attempt to come up with a Twitter metrics methodology relevant to news organizations.

There's no better place to start than with Avinash Kaushik's November 2009 blog post.  Among other things, Kaushik is Google's "analytics evangelist."  He's not only an innovative web analytics thinker but also someone who really cares whether the common everyday professional understands this stuff - and uses it.

Why should news orgs measure their Twitter efforts?  Why don't they just tweet away and just count how much traffic Twitter sends to their sites?

Twitter is essential for news orgs.  News orgs won't be able to attract, build and engage audiences if they don't use social media successfully.   If news orgs don't believe this then...(insert your fave cliche about ostriches or whatever here).

Twitter takes a lot of time and effort.  At the very least, news orgs should use Twitter metrics so they can use their journalists' time and efforts effectively.  Who tweets?  Who doesn't?  Who should - and shouldn't?  Who should tweet more?  Less?  On what?  With whom?  Are news orgs reaching and engaging the audiences they need and want?

So, here are the key thoughts I have from Kaushik's blog. 

First, just as you shouldn't apply traditional mass media metrics to the web, you shouldn't use traditional web metrics to measure social media. 

Example: Total circulation/readership is a key performance indicator for print, but monthly unique visitors isn't.  You can count anything, but you shouldn't waste time on counts that don't directly lead to specific actions.

Kaushik:  "One of the biggest mistake companies and brands make about Twitter is that they think it is one more 'shout channel' like TV and radio and magazine ads or press releases. Twitter is not that. Twitter is a 'conversation channel,' a place where you can find the audience relevant to you (and your company and products and services and jihad) and engage in a conversation with them. It is not pitching, it is enriching the value of the ecosystem by participating."

For Twitter, Kaushik likes Klout's methodology for assessing reach, demand, engagement and velocity.  Klout gives metrics on each of these areas from which you can "pick and choose according to the objective/action/decision needed."

Klout also gives a total score or compound metric, which Kaushik warns against.  Compound metrics "can be subjective, inapplicable to many and efficiently hide the insights you need to understand what actions to take."

Instead of the simplistic follower/following ratio that many use to define Twitter success, Kaushik likes total retweets, number of retweets per thousand, messages per outbound message and churn.  These metrics measure conversation, not "just yelling."

About all of those followers:  Kaushik's intrigued (as am I) by GraphEdge's assertion that those followers who are following more than 2,000 people aren't "legitimate" because they aren't really monitoring your feed.  

I don't think those following more than 2,000 should be completely discounted.  After all, someone could be following you and not following the other 1,999 people.  And that someone could be really important to your targeted audience.

GraphEdge and other tools show much promise in figuring out what news orgs need to do with Twitter.  But it's going to take some time and a lot of effort.  Kaushik:  "Be willing to work hard. Be willing to put in the sweat equity. Be willing to try 45 things (tools/metrics/strategies) to find the three that work for you."

Ack!  Forty-five things to find three?  Unfortunately I think (actually, I know) he's right.  I'll be digging into Klout and GraphEdge, but I don't know if I'll be looking into 43 more things.  For news orgs, it might take more than that to find the magic three.

 

A world record - so what?

I guess I'm proud to say that I contributed one of the reported 45-million-plus views to the Evian Roller Babies video ad, which is touted by the Guinness Book of World Records as "the most viewed online advertisement in history."  

I can't find any verification from Guinness itself on the web.  OK, I didn't look that hard, and I didn't contact Guinness.  I didn't think it was worth much effort because this record - like so many other Guinness records -  is one of those "so what" numbers - mildly amusing, sort of astounding, and utterly useless.

Mashable's Ben Parr, saying that "millions" remembered and "actively discussed" this "critically acclaimed" ad,  thinks that "any brand will take those numbers."

If I were Evian, the only numbers I would take are those in dollars, euros, yen, pounds and pesos and the like.  I agree with David Berkowitz in Social Media Insider:  "I have yet to see any coverage of the record that mentions Evian's market share or any other success metric from the brand's perspective. Maybe a needle moved, maybe nothing happened, but it's hardly a clear-cut case that a viral ad means it's successful."

It's a highly watchable, entertaining video, but it hardly embeds "Evian" in my brain or makes me want to buy it.  What do roller-skating babies have to do with mineral water?  The babies don't even drink Evian in the video - they just skate around the bottles.  I guess the Evian's tag at the end, "Live Young," ties it all together.

 And of course there are quibbles how video ads are counted, and how the 45-million figure came about.  Apparently it was a combination of YouTube, Nielsen, Ad Age and Visual Measures.  Because the video was embedded in many places, you can't just look at the number of views on YouTube, which right now is showing about 11 million views. 

Whatever.  It really doesn't matter.

The audience determines the value of content, not publishers

Why do most newspaper publishers persist in thinking audiences will come back to print?  Why do publishers put their own opinions ahead of their audiences? 

You can't get people to pay for anything if

• they don't need or want it
• they can get it from somewhere else

You really don't need a study to know that publishers value their content more than audiences do, but I'm glad the American Press Institute did one anyway.

API's study, as reported by eMarketer, shows that news providers "were more likely to say that their content was 'very valuable,' while readers tended to settle on 'somewhat valuable.'"

An opinion of "somewhat valuable" should not lead to a decision to charge for content, especially if 52 percent of newspaper site readers said that finding a replacement for newspaper site content would be "very easy" or "somewhat easy."

What's more discouraging is that 75 percent of publishers believe readers would go back to print. 

What?  Why would publishers think this?

Because many of them are still looking at online as a necessary evil (my words, not API's, obviously).  Twenty-eight percent of publishers think that they should charge for content to preserve print circulation.  Four percent want to do it to replace "lost display ad revenues." 

Eighteen percent think charging for content will establish "value for copyrighted content."  I hope this means that before they set prices they will ruthlessly assess which content topics do indeed have value - to the target audiences.  I hope they are equally ruthless in identifying their competitors' strengths and weaknesses, both current and potential. 

Prices shouldn't be based on

• what the publishers think the content's worth
• what would make online pay for itself
• what's needed to make up for lost print revenue

Setting prices and revenue goals based mainly on internal reasons is like trying to get back the purchase price and remodeling costs of a house that you love but which few others do.  With anything involving money, the market sets the price.

 

Pop-up videos make government engaging

Today I watched over seven minutes - from beginning to end - of The Texas Tribune's Nov. 9 news video coverage of Kay Bailey Hutchison's gubernatorial campaign stump speech.  

The video, one of The Tribune's "Stump Interrupted" series, uses pop-up bubbles and illustrations to add context and value to a normally boring but important story.  The pop-ups are entertaining without being silly. 

When KBH is saying, "Our taxes have gone up too much in the last ten years," the pop-up points out that "But...since 2003, Texas still had the 14th lowest per capita tax increase in the country."

KBH: "I think that we are seeing too much power in one person, the power of appointment."

Pop-ups:  A large hand illustrating someone being appointed glides in from the left, followed by the fact that "Governor [Rick] Perry has made about 5,530 appointments since first taking office."

On the site, people can also see the sources The Tribune used for the pop-ups.

The metrics angle:  Counting how many times a video was viewed doesn't give any info on whether the viewer was engaged.  The more relevant measure is how much of the video was viewed, and whether the video was viewed from beginning to end.

I would also look at video metrics by topic, and set goals accordingly.  I would imagine (no, really?) that the number of complete views of a Dallas Cowboys video is usually much higher than that of anything having to do with politics, even in Texas.

The Texas Tribune got California-born-and-bred me to watch a KBH video from beginning to end.  I'm now more interested in both Texas politics and in how The Tribune covers it. Imagine how engaged a Texas resident who has a stake in this would be.

Actually, The Tribune doesn't have to completely guess at this.  In addition to commenting and e-mailing the story, people can rate a story as a "must read." 

I'm really intrigued about what The Tribune will do next.  It's a nonprofit news org that, according to WebNewser, didn't cover the Fort Hood shootings because it's "dedicated to covering 'the politics and policy of Texas state government.'" 

I love this focus on identifying a niche audience and topic, and sticking to serving the needs of that audience.  WebNewser reported that editor Matt Stiles said that the Fort Hood story just "wasn't our story.  Should we have jut been one more news organization rushing to Fort Hood?  I don't think so."

The Tribune's a great example of a truly audience-focused news organization with unique and compelling content that provides value.  Despite being staffed by "newspaper refugees," it's refreshingly not content-focused.  It doesn't build the content first and then hope the audience will come.    

Hank Wasiak: "From Mad Man to Twitteraholic"

As he said himself, Hank Wasiak is not Don Draper, but his ten minutes were the highlight for me at the 140 Characters Conference in LA last week. 

Wasiak, co-founder of The Concept Farm, said that social media, as a "killer app," has brought about a fundamental change in the way we do business and in the metrics that define success.  He said companies must have a "mindset makeover" and a "people strategy" to survive. 

He was talking about marketing and advertising, but all I could think about was how everything he said applies to news organizations, too.

Oh, and he also said that the way we're teaching is completely outdated.  I agree...I'm going to see if I can take his marketing and advertising class at the USC Marshall School of Business in the spring.

140 characters of engagement

I've just gotten back from the 140 Characters Conference in LA where the message, loud and clear and 10 minutes per speaker at a time, was that it's the quality of your followers that matters, not the quantity. 

More reinforcement:  Twitter's new list function is already prompting "mass unfollowings" (thanks to Mary McKinnon/@bestwebstrategy for this link). 

The first #140conf in New York in June was all about the unique communities that Twitter inspired.  The dominant sponsor was Hootsuite, personified by a large owl walking around hugging people.  Ann Curry duked it out with Rick Sanchez.  Wyclef Jean showed up, late of course, but illustrating the importance of authencity.  Attendees bonded over the duct-taped power outlets.   

Five months later, it appears that Twitter has...matured.  The speakers in LA weren't giddy.  The lead sponsor was Kodak, represented by CMO Jeffrey Hayzlett, a glossy brochure touting Kodak's "convergence media tactics" and coupons for 15 percent off Kodak products. You can't have either duct tape or power outlets in the Kodak Theatre (where the Academy Awards are held) so the crowd was often bigger in the lobby than in the auditorium.

I still had fun at #140conf LA - it is Twitter, after all - but the biz talk was pervasive:  strategy, goals, objectives, processes, systems, results, the four Ps and the four Es, one of which was, of course, engagement.

Analyzing Twitter

I've been scratching at developing some methodology that newsrooms can use for measuring the success of their Twitter strategies for some time now.  Unfortunately, I haven't had much time to really focus on it.  However, a couple of nuggets I saw today reinforce my hypotheses that simple counts of followers and tweets mean very little.  You really need to dig deep and spend the time (sigh) analyzing follower profiles and tweet content. 

Thanks to Mashable today, I've finally found the site that keeps a running count of how many users use Twitter via its web site vs. third-party clients or applications like TweetDeck.  Twitstat currently shows that only 20 percent (!) of Twitter usage comes from the web site.  Now I'm really going to scrutinize the methodology of any reports on Twitter usage.  I suspect most of them - especially the panel researchers like comScore or Nielsen - only capture site traffic.

This stat from iMedia Connection is from September but it's probably still useful.  "Roughly one quarter (24 percent) of Twitter users have never tweeted or have ceased doing so, according to data from audience measurement firm Crowd Science. That number is very close to the percentage of users who tweet on a daily basis (27 percent)." 

I'm really looking forward to the 140 Characters Conference in Los Angeles next week.  After that I'm sure I'll be inspired to really buckle down and figure this out!

The number's good except when it's not

Based on a Hitwise report, Online Media Daily reported that Twitter's "torrid growth has cooled since April."  But the Hitwise number is deeply flawed - it doesn't include traffic from "mobile and application-driven traffic." 

In other words, Hitwise's report is based solely on traffic from Twitter's web site.  It doesn't include traffic from smartphones and applications like TweetDeck.   Hitwise's report is just not that useful because it doesn't include traffic from the devices and software that have made Twitter ubiquitous and easy to use, and which probably have contributed greatly to Twitter's growth.

I say "probably" because we just don't know one way or another.  Everyone's still trying to figure out how to measure mobile web use.  It's hard because there are multiple carriers and devices.  But just because a number is hard to get doesn't mean we should use a number whose only virtue is that it's easy. 

 

Niche audience = $10 million

"...Mail.com Media Corporation...purchased Deadline Hollywood Daily for upward of ten million dollars....It is an ambitious plan for a site that attracts a few hundred thousand unique visitors per month - but then many in that group check the site ten times a day."  "Call Me," by Tad Friend, The New Yorker, Oct. 12, 2009 

This is a telling statement, despite mixing up the use of "monthly unique visitors" with "daily unique visitors." 

It doesn't matter how many millions of "monthly unique visitors" a news site has.  The value of a site is based on the ratio of visits per weekly or daily unique visitor.  

It also matters who those unique visitors are.  Deadline Hollywood Daily is a must-read, not just for the hangers-on in the "Industry" but for studio and agency executives at the highest levels.

Nikki Finke, the diva extraordinaire without whom DHD would be worth nearly nothing, posts 24/7, multiple times a day.  So, the number of visits per daily unique visitor is the more appropriate metric.  The number of monthly unique visitors is a "so what" number - useless.

Short-form videos need short ads; video subscriptions

As you add more short-form videos to your site, watch the length of the ads in proportion to the length of the videos.

At the Online News Association conference last week, many presenters stressed the importance of posting more short videos (30-120 seconds) more often rather than waiting days or weeks to craft a traditional long-form TV story package.   Chet Rhodes, the deputy multimedia editor for breaking news at washingtonpost.com, said that the Post has problems supplying enough video inventory to its advertisers.

Many studies, including this new report from eMarketer, show that "online video viewership has never been higher."   However, the study points out that audiences' acceptance of video advertising is dependent on the "growth of professional content" and targeted, less intrusive ads. 

Has the growth in your video traffic - as measured by multiple metrics including the number of viewers and how much of the video was viewed - kept up with your audiences' hunger for more live and breaking news videos? 

ONA presentations

Download my Online News Association presentation on basic metrics and social media metrics. Right-click or option-click the link and choose "Save As" or "Save Link As."

You can also download an explanation of unique visitors and visits. 

Both of these files are also available at http://www.slideshare.net/danachinn.

What does "traffic" mean?

As heard from Martin Nisenholtz at the OMMA Global conference last week, Twitter drives 10 percent of the New York Times' traffic.

What does this mean?  Is it 10 percent of page views?  Unique visitors?  Visits?  Page views per visit?  Visits per unique visitor?  

Nisenholtz, the senior VP of the NYT's digital operations, reportedly said that the NYT's Twitter account has 1.8 million followers and growing.

OK.  That's a nice big number.  But it doesn't tell you anything about whether any of those followers - or anyone who got to the site through Twitter - really engaged with the site.  How many followers go to the NYT site?  How often? 

I have no doubt Twitter is an important source of traffic - however it's defined - for the NYT and other news sites.  Let's take the time to dig deeper so we really understand Twitter's impact.

Reminder: Use ratios

The NielsenWire headline screams, "Total Online Video Streams up 41% from Last Year."  So video viewership has gone up significantly, right?  No, not as much as 41 percent would suggest. 

Streams per viewer in August 2009 were up about 20 percent over August 2008.  Now, 20 percent is still a lot, but it's not 41, especially because the total number of unique viewers "only" went up 18 percent.

So - there are more people watching videos, and each person is watching more videos (instead of working, sleeping, etc.).   

These metrics are especially relevant if you've increased your commitment to video over the past year.  Has your investment paid off as much as it should have?  Are more people watching your videos?  Is each visitor, on average, viewing more of your videos? 

I'd also toss in metrics - like the percent of viewers who started watching videos but didn't finish them - that indicate whether your content is working.

There are technical and vendor reasons to know the total number of video streams, but this metric is not very useful for news decisions.

Adobe + Omniture = new rich media measurement standards

The news about Adobe buying Omniture mystified me until I read this speculation by Rob Rose in iMedia Connection. 

Adobe's the company behind Photoshop, PDFs and other software standards that have become generic trademarks like Kleenex.  Omniture's the leading web analytics vendor for news organizations.

"Imagine Adobe/Flash/Omniture becoming the default rating system for online video.  Basically they could become the Nielsen or ComScore of YouTube Videos.  Or, imagine the new company being able to provide measurement on whether your PDF's are being read - and to what page they were read.   Or imagine, them being able to tell you at what point people fell out of your online video demonstration.    Or, finally, imagine them being able to tell you what parts of your hybrid consumer application are the most popular, the least frequented - or a hundred other things that I can imagine."

In other words, new standards for measuring rich media are likely to come.

Total unique visitors and paid content

Because it's easy to gather and it looks like circulation and readership, the number of monthly unique visitors continues to be a key indicator of online success for news orgs.  This is really dangerous, especially if used to develop news business models.

The total number of monthly UVs just doesn't give any information about how engaged audiences are.  Let's say you have 100 million monthly uniques, as paidContent.org reports the new Steve Brill Journalism Online venture is aiming for. 

This number doesn't tell you whether those 100 million of those visitors visited once or 10 times, or whether they went to one page or to 20.  

You really need to know the level of engagement to sell online advertising.  And, you really need to know how engaged people are if your business model depends on paid subscribers or content.

According to paidContent.org, Journalism Online is counting on about 10 percent of its news affiliates' audiences to pay for content.  Sounds like a realistic, reasonable number, right?

No, it's faulty business logic.  Simply assuming a small percent

E-mail newsletter benchmarks

Here are some benchmarks to use as a guide when setting KPI goals for e-mail newsletters or alerts.  The open rate and the bounce rates are the most important.

The benchmarks come from a study by a e-mail vendor featured in an eMarketer story.

Metric	Low	High
Open rate	20%	31%
Click rate	4%	7%
Soft bounce rate	.1%	2%
Hard bounce rate	.3%	3%
Unsubscribe rate	.4%	.5%

The open rate is the most important; the total number of subscribers much less so.  You're not engaging your audiences if you're pushing e-mails to them but they're deleting them without even looking at them. 

If the content in your newsletter is pretty complete in itself (e.g., breaking news alerts, news briefs), your click-through rate will be low.  You might not even want to monitor it.  

Not all e-mail newsletters should relentlessly focus on pushing traffic to sites.  Segment your audiences and ask each segment how they would most like to get your content.  Perhaps an audience largely gets its e-mails via a smartphone, and don't want to link to a site. 

A little bit of engagement - subscribing to and regularly reading your e-mails - is better than none at all.

Hard bounce:  The number of e-mails returned due to invalid e-mail addresses or spam filters.

Soft bounce:  The number of e-mails returned due to temporary reasons such as inboxes being too full or the subscribers' e-mail services being down. 

Count "active" users, not totals

It's tempting to measure success by the total number of unique visitors.  Total UVs, total registered users, total paid subscribers - they are all nice, round numbers bandied and crowed about in the newsroom and in the media, just like circulation.

Circulation (or readership) and the circulation penetration (the percent of the households reached) are the correct success metrics for mass media print, partly because they're drivers behind advertising decisions. 

Online is a niche, interactive medium.  It's far more important to measure the number of active users - however you define "active" - and what those active users did or didn't do.

As Neil Mason in ClickZ writes, measuring only total users is "a case of be careful what you measure, because what you measure is what you get. 

"Because the business was focused on measuring registrations, the drive was to generate as many registered users as possible, irrespective of the quality of those registrations and whether they were likely to actually do anything valuable on the site."

Totals do no harm.  But they don't tell you what you need to retain your audiences and attract new ones. 

"If it can be rated, it will be rated"

So says Rich Barton, founder or co-founder of Expedia, Zillow and Glassdoor.com, in Kevin Maney's article "The Rating Game" in the July/August issue of The Atlantic.

Maney points out that not only do "one-third of all American Internet users rated something online," but also that "the proliferation in ratings is already changing societal dynamics."

The story was a reminder that:

• Ratings and comments are essential to have on everything in a news organization's collection of sites, even if it's just a simple "like this" rating (e.g., "89 people like this story").


• News orgs must candidly assess their standing vs. niche competitors such as TripAdvisor, Yelp and local news blogs.  I'm still seeing news orgs comparing themselves only against their own kind, e.g., daily newspapers vs. weeklies and magazines.  And it's interesting - sad? - that Maney's article doesn't use a single news org in its examples.


• With comments, it's all about the quality of the comments and the contributors, not the quantity.  This means defining and measuring success will be labor-intensive and and relatively subjective.


• To be truly usable, attitudinal surveys must be highly targeted by category and cover both current and non-users.  I mourn the money and time wasted by those "market studies"  that focus mostly on the news org and its position in a broad geographic region rather than the current and potential audiences for specific niches.
  
  Surveys should not only ask where people are going for information to make decisions but also where they submit ratings and comments, and how often.  What a person reads vs. what he rates vs. what he comments on will differ by topic.

Seattle's "resurgent" audiences

I'm not convinced that the Seattle Times' 30 percent increase in print circulation, as reported by the New York Times, is cause for much optimism.

First, the increase comes from former Post-Intelligencer subscribers.  These are dyed-in-the-wool newspaper people.  We love them, but they are not new audiences.

Secondly, increases in advertising revenue no longer neatly correlate with print circulation increases.  Even when the economy picks up, I doubt that The Times will get a substantial ad revenue bump from either rate increases or new advertisers. 

Advertisers are reaching their customers in new ways; the old business models just don't apply.  The costs of providing the print edition - newsprint, ink, delivery - for 365 days a year to 30 percent more subscribers aren't covered by subscription revenue, and are now unlikely to be covered by advertising. 

The New York Times article points out that SeattlePI.com seems to have "kept most of the reader traffic it had as a newspaper site."  Also, past Seattle Times and P-I staffers have started a number of local news sites.

The audiences for news in Seattle haven't grown.  They've just shifted, from print P-I to print Seattle Times, and, increasingly, from print to online.

Traffic spikes aren't always good news

Here's a good point about interpreting high traffic spikes.  It's from Google's Brett Crosby, as reported by Online Media Daily.

If you get a sudden bump in visits due to a breaking news event, don't celebrate until you look at the time of day of the spikes, the timing of your competitor's posts, and your bounce rates. 

Your competitor might have posted before you did.  And if your competitor had better coverage, your bounce rate would probably reflect it. 

Then, use attitudinal research to gauge whether the traffic spikes led to building audiences in the long run.  For example, you can survey people to see whether they think your site "always has the latest news about [a topic] before anyone else."  

Be sure to include a healthy sample of non-users and light users in your surveys.  It will be more time-consuming and expensive - and perhaps painful.  But listening only to your current users through online pop-up surveys won't give you the insight you need to grow online audiences.  

The essential categories for "news"

I really like the new simplified structure of The Washington Post's mobile site, as reported by Online Media Daily.

Mobile's size really forces publishers to really parse news into the most essential categories, the fewer the better.  For the Post, those categories are:  top stories; politics; business; metro; arts & living; sports; and a going out guide.

More importantly, these categories are simple words.  Unlike  newspaper section names, they are instantly understood.  

Facebook removes geographic regions

By removing the ability to search fans by geographic region, Facebook just made it a little bit harder for news organizations to understand whether their Facebook pages are reaching their target audiences.

Facebook explained in June that it was removing the ability to join a regional network:  "If you've ever created a group or event and set it so that only members of a certain regional network could join, that group or event will now become open to everyone."

This panics data people.  "Everyone" is like "miscellaneous" or "all other."   It's like putting bunches of important documents in manila file folders, all unmarked.

Ben Parr of Mashable thinks that this is Facebook's "attempt to make [its] platform more open - part of its Twitterification."

This change reinforces the need for news orgs to clearly define the objectives, target audiences and business models for each

First there was WAG, now there's CPW...

....and don't forget about ROO.  I love using WAG ("wild-assed guess") instead of bad data, and now I have another metric to recommend:  CPW, or "cost per whatever." 

In his iMedia Connection blog, David Smith of Mediasmith lays claim to coining CPW, saying that "We all know (or should know) by now that CPC is dead. Clickthrough rates, once the hallmark metric of Web success, have proven to be irrelevant and it is time we moved on."

In other words, measure what really defines success or ROO -  "return on objective," not Kanga and Roo. 

WAG, CPW and ROO are all really useful, and, as Smith points out, these terms prompt "a little smile when someone first hears it.  And any analytics conversation can use that."

A vote for using ratios rather than numbers

"The value of advertising online ought to be measured more by engagement than by sheer numbers, that is, more by metrics like time spent or page views per user than by the sheer number of people coming to the site, many of whom may not assign any value to the journalists who generated the content.

"Indeed, as we hear more about “freemium” (mixed paid and free) models, publishers and editors ought to be thinking about who their most engaged readers are and what characteristics they share."

-- From "Yes, News Sites Are Facing A Crisis, But Aggregators Aren't The Problem," by Bill Grueskin, Columbia University, in paidContent.org

Nielsen vs. comScore and the problem with panels

Here's an excellent analysis of the differences between Nielsen and comScore from Wall Street Journal "Numbers Guy" Carl Bialik, who explains numbers better than anyone.

Nielsen and comScore are fighting to be the primary provider of web traffic counts, the currency currently used to make decisions on many things from advertising to market valuations.

However, both companies use panels.  "One concern about online panels, as mentioned in the past, is that those who volunteer may not be representative of Internet users as a whole," Bialik reports.

Nielsen just increased the size of the panel and comScore is starting to incorporate self-reported traffic from publishers. 

Regardless, neither company - or any other third-party vendor - will ever be able to provide the detail needed for internal strategic planning and decision-making.   

Twitter: the future "pulse of the planet"

"If [Twitter] had a billion users, that will be the pulse of the planet."

--  from TechCrunch, who received Twitter's internal documents from a hacker

TechCrunch estimates that Twitter currently has 20 million U.S. users, "and nearly double that worldwide." 

So, Twitter's got a ways to go, but the document projects it'll reach that billion in five years, by 2013. 

And oh yeah, it says it needs to make more revenue, too.  It wants to work up to "$1 per user per year."

Now this is "engagement"

Whether you think it's astounding or just pathetic, 71 percent of Facebook users say they can't live without it.

The Anderson Analytics study, as reported by Online Media Daily, included 5,000 U.S. social media users and covered MySpace and LinkedIn.  Only 35 percent said they could give up MySpace. 

How connected are your communities to your social media services?   Be sure to ask "Could you do without it?" - and why - on your next surveys.  This is essential information that you just can't get with counting page views, visits and unique visitors.

One formula for evaluating comments

Razorfish, a digital marketing agency, has developed a scoring system for evaluating how a company is discussed in Facebook, YouTube and other social media.

From Online Media Daily:  "The basic formula for deriving a brand's SIM Score involves dividing "net sentiment" for a brand by the net sentiment for its industry group. (Net sentiment = positive + neutral conversations - negative conversations/total conversations.)"

If tracked over time, this index can illustrate broad trends in your social media progress.  However, implementation could be difficult and time-intensive.  You have to ensure that "positive," "neutral" and "negative"  are clearly defined and applied consistently - no small task. Also, what's a "conversation?"

This formula weights comments from everyone equally.  This may not be appropriate in social media communities where there are individuals whose comments are more influential than others.

In any case - however you do it - do count and analyze your comments regularly and consistently to track your ability to maintain and grow a social network. 

Segment audiences by age and gender

Here are two stats (and one really fun tool) about younger audience online media usage that illustrate why it's essential to segment your audiences by age and gender, at the very least. 

• Video:  Young men aged 18-24 are most likely to upload video, according to an Online Media Daily story about a Forrester Research report about consumer-generated videos, which are most often used in contests.  "To be precise, 13% of users 18 to 24 report uploading online video monthly, compared to just 6% of all other online users."  The report suggests using photo contests if you're targeting users older than 35.


• Mobile:  Teens can be targeted with mobile texts and videos, according to eMarketer's analysis of a Nielsen report about "How Teens Use Media."  Seventy-seven percent have their own mobile phone, and 11 percent regularly borrow one, leaving only 12 percent (about one in ten) who have no mobile phone at all (can you imagine?).
  
  These teens spend 6.5 hours per month watching mobile video clips, much more than the average of 3 hours and 37 minutes across all age groups. 

For baseline data about social media behavior, see Forrester Research's

Using stats from Facebook's self-serve advertising program

Even Facebook doesn't have demographics and user info. on all of its users, as this ReadWriteWeb story illustrates.  In particular, look at the comments which point out all of the problems with using an incomplete set of data.

Facebook doesn't require users to provide age, geographic location and other basic demographic data when they sign up.  Thus, the user data you get when you go through the self-serve advertising program doesn't include all of those people who didn't submit data.  And you don't know how many, or how these missing people differ.

Also, Facebook doesn't require people to update their data, which causes other problems.  One of the ReadWriteWeb story commenters noted that  students who graduate from a high school or college may or may not be counted as students.

Facebook data should not be used for planning your social media strategies and services.  You're better off guessing than using this data.  Bad data may

The number of people watching "long" videos is increasing...

...which means you probably should measure video viewings by length of video in addition to the usual measures such as the amount of video viewed.

Online Media Daily reported that, according to Nielsen, the number of unique visitors to Hulu.com increased from 9 million to 10.1 million between October 2008 and May; total streams, 206,000 to 382,000.  You can watch entire TV series episodes and movies on Hulu. 

Also: "The average video is now 14 minutes long, whereas a year ago all but one of Blip's top 25 shows was under 5 minutes. The two-minute limit no longer applies."

This is stark contrast to 12seconds.tv, the video service equivalent to Twitter.  12seconds can be incorporated with Twitter (it's a button on TweetDeck), Facebook and other social media services.