It’s always encouraging to come across a media publisher that believes in audience analytics as much as we do. In a recent article The Newsonomics of the FT as an Internet retailer, The Financial Times reveals that it uses analytics all the time to drive reader revenue and advertising revenue.
The core of our real time audience analytics services hinges on making real time audience data accessible and meaningful to online media publishers. It is one thing to capture and display alot of data, but the real value is making what you capture and display actually useable. And what better way to use analytics than to help a media publisher make more money.
FT.com views itself as an Internet retailer more than an online publisher. It is a point often lost by or not even contemplated by most online media publishers. Once you realize that you are trying to sell a product (content) the same way a retailer is trying to sell a physical good, a new paradigm opens up and you can look at your online media publishing operations in a completely new way.
Where do you start? by collecting as much real time audience and revenue information as you can for each link you produce. And you continue to do this all the time, forever more.
If it seems like a daunting challenge, it is if you go it alone. It’s not if you use services like publishflow™. You can begin tracking real time audience behaviour, content performance and revenue performance for your online media property in under 5 minutes. Don’t believe me…
A significant move happened in the online publishing world this week and it is a sign of things to come for any online publishing company that is burning money managing their own hosting operations.
Newsweek.com announced this week that the site is outsourcing its Web site hosting duties to Amazon, joining a small but growing number of companies experimenting with cloud computing.
“Until now, Newsweek.com had been hosted by its parent company, The Washington Post Co. The media company has been trying to cut losses at its magazine division, which recorded $29.3 million in operating losses in 2009. By joining the cloud, Newsweek expects to save close to $500,000 annually.
“It saves Newsweek money,” said Geoff Reiss, vp, general manager, Newsweek Digital.
“Lots of people out there built their own infrastructure and are going to be tortured by this idea of sunk costs.”
Kontexto started using Amazon Web Services in early 2008 and now our whole real time content analytics platform is built on the Amazon cloud. We have always been lobbing the idea around of launching a cloud based news infrastructure that takes care of everything post publishing including storage, search, delivery and analytics. Give the CMS and editing freedom to the content creators, but hand off everything else.
After newsweek.com, it is hard to say who will be the next to transition hosting to the cloud. Some other certainly have without announcing it. But it is good to see a brand name publication make an organizational shift to the cloud.
Short post, but this is an article worth reading if you are interested in how a legacy print magazine is trying to fit into Bloomberg, a real time data organization.
Bloomberg is in the business of selling data terminals and everything else supports that cause. They are damn successful doing this and pride themselves on being the most influential news organization in the world. True or not is up to you, but they do produce news that moves markets.
I have picked out some points from the article and will share my brief thoughts on them, as they capture some broader themes we are seeing emerge across the online publishing world namely:
Profit - News needs to have a profit motive
AND
Measurement - Everything can be measured in the news creation process
Some other points from the article:
1. News should help people make money. Whether the creator of the news or the consumer of the news, there is a profit motive. If news makes money, then everyone is happy.
This flies right in the face of everything taught in Journalism school and the Businessweek staff that did not buy into this philosophy were shown the door or remain at Bloomberg and are adapting.
2. Bloomberg operates a “speed desk”, with the sole purpose of quantifying how much news they get out first and if that news makes people money.
I think this philosophy can be taken all the way down the chain from global news providers like Bloomberg to hyperlocal news providers. If you get more content out before your competitors (speed), you will build a loyal audience for that.
3. Every Bloomberg writer has a “dashboard” where the metrics determining his compensation — any scoops, hits an article attracts — are tracked.
This is precisely the type of feedback and support that content creators need and can use to their advantage. There is a real resistance to measurement in the newsroom, but it is going mainstream and it should be embraced as a positive not a negative. Staying employed, building an audience and improving the success of your content choices seems to be a reasonable plan, real time metrics can help you do this.
4. This is an angle I had not considered… the psychological impact over time on individuals of creating content that does not make money. As put by a former Businessweek employee about his colleagues… “They really feel like writing for Businessweek is a waste of time — it’s not making money, they get nothing out it,”
People are generally happier when they are making money and if metrics and data can help you to make your content more profitable then you should embrace it.
The exclamation point is their touch, not mine. But, the all out battle has begun between the news paywallers and the legions of hacks that seek to get around those paywalls with their wallets no lighter than when they arrived.
BreakthePaywall! is the first news paywall hack I have come across that is looking to promote itself and gain adoption amongst people looking to circumvent news paywalls.
Looks like it is a browser add on that simplifies the process of deleting cookies, which news sites plant to track how many free articles are read before they cut you off. For existing account based paywalls that charge for everything, they are hardly a threat. But, I think this serves as a reminder of the reticence to pay for general online news content.
They are currently seeking donations to fund the development of the service and I suspect grow the slush fund for their legal team when the times comes.
The UK Association of Online Publishers (AOP) released its annual Organisation Census today and although you have to be a member of the AOP to read the full report, you can see an in depth overview of the census data in this release at econsultancy.
The census had a 100% response rate and it seems thing are looking up for online publishers in 2010 with hiring, new product development and a general sense of optimism back on deck.
I can certainly attest to the fact it has been a tough 2 years since the general economy and traditional media took a nose dive. Our original business plans had to be put on hold for a while given frozen budgets and a general uncertainty amongst online publishers. But I can support some of the optimism in the census data as we are back in meeting rooms giving presentations and lining up pilot programs for our real time analytics service publishflow™.
So of all the data in the census 2010, what are the three biggest challenges facing online publishers, with which they require help?
1. Mobile services development (51% of respondents)
2. Measurement of ROI (41% of respondents)
3. Database development and utilisation (40% of respondents)
This is a very good time to be a start up either looking to set up as an online publisher (maybe someday for us) OR to supply software and services to online publishers trying to take care of the three concerns above (today for us).
Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google, has put together a solid summary of the current economic challenges facing traditional newspaper organizations.
You may have come across some of the data in bits and chunks over the past few months, but his slides consolidate what you need to know.
Depending on your position in the news space, you will have your own takeaways… my takeaways:
1. Online ad revenue for newspapers is only about 5% of total ad revenue - imo big upside for news publishers to pull ad budgets online. Can they do it? So far it’s not happening.
2. Time spent reading (scanning) online news is about 1 minute per day for the average person - imo most people are reading during the day while at work for a quick hit, but sites are still repackaged newspapers not intended for a quick hit experience.
3. Leisure reading happens weekends and outside of work hours while people are on the move - imo newspapers should double down fast and start creating the next “weekend” reading experiences for tablet and mobile devices.
4. 14% of costs as a percentage of revenue are from editorial activities - imo this is the shining light for the future of media and in particular news. 86% of costs as a percentage of revenue for newspapers are NOT related to content creation, drop that anchor and you have a whole new economic reality for news distribution.
I remember a conversation I had about 5 months ago with a former online editorial director of one of the UK’s big four newspapers…
me: “what does your ideal news organization look like?”
him: “Small office with cheap rent. 6 guys. 3 editors, 2 programmers, 1 sales guy. Outsource all content creation to freelance text, audio and video journo’s. Start with mobile content creation first and work backwards to the desktop browser if we even make it there.
me: “as long as all of you are analytics guys as well and using our publishflow™ analytics service, I am on board”
Enough from me, let’s hand the floor over to Hal Varian from Google…
I have a bunch of searches set up to track the evolution of online news job postings. In particular I am looking for job postings that mention the words “real time”, “monitor site traffic”, “story placement”, “story trends” and other word combinations that capture the convergence of editor, web producer and stats geek.
Similar to the portadista job role I posted and reviewed last year, this one for a site manager at the TheStreet.com just popped up. I have highlighted the interesting chunk.
It is good to see big media sites starting to realize the value of using data and real time metrics to provide content decision support. We are big believers of this growing trend, which is why we are building a business around delivering real time analysis and insight to online news publishers via our service publishflow™.
This is the most interesting video I have seen yet of all of the iPad magazine concept videos. It is a stellar mock-up of a tablet based magazine from Bonnier R&D presented by BERG.
Some interesting gesture movements to activate advanced content interaction features. Big challenge to do so in a way that does not compromise the reading/viewing experience.
I found this video via our friends over at specle.net. They operate a real time ad spec engine for publishers and advertisers. I had occasion to meet up with their founder a year ago and I am big fan of their service.
It is one of the first semi-mainstream articles I have come across that deconstructs an article into a collection of assembled words. And in the authors opinion, all too often articles have way too many words that do not add any value to the story at hand.
The value of a word, a collection of words, an article and even a publication is in the eye of the beholder, so I am not going to rehash this authors take on things. You can read the article and see some interesting examples he uses of wasted words.
What I would like to highlight is the last passage of the article, which in my opinion addresses the actual business case of deconstructing stories using the “cost of words” (measurable) versus the “value of words” (subjective).
“On the first day of my first real job in journalism—on the copy desk at the Royal Oak Daily Tribune in Royal Oak, Michigan—the chief copy editor said, “Remember, every word you cut saves the publisher money.” At the time, saving the publisher money didn’t strike me as the world’s noblest ideal. These days, for anyone in journalism, it’s more compelling.”
It is interesting (for me at least) to think of news publishers as speculators whose job is to invest in words. Sometimes you go long and sometimes you go short. The trick is to be long or short on the right things. Whether investor or publisher, that challenge remains.
Most of the newsrooms we work with are using traditional web analytics services like Omniture, Webtrends and Google Analytics to quantify their traffic and page impression stats on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Nothing shocking here, pretty much par for the course.
But it is rare that we see newsrooms really studying their analytics data on an hourly or daily basis to uncover new insight about visitor behaviour, story preferences and overall engagement with authors. There is a ton of information trapped in traditional web analytics packages that can help newsrooms become more efficient and make more money.
It has long been our vision at Kontexto, that newsrooms will need to start using traditional ‘return on investment’ business metrics for every story they create. Like every other business that makes decisions based on future returns, newsrooms can be no different if they wish to survive.
Companies like Demand Media, Huff Post and others are onto this, but AOL is the first big media brand embracing this approach and you can get up to speed on it in a brief, but timely article from Businessweek ‘AOL Moves to Build Tech ‘Newsroom of the Future’… CEO Tim Armstrong deploys software that helps journalists collaborate on articles readers seem to want, then reports the traffic they generate.
They are using stats, stats and more stats to determine what topics, stories and authors are successful over time. But more importantly, it uncovers what is not working over time so adjustments can be made.
“ROI”, “efficient allocation of resources” and “market driven story creation” may seem cold and dry, but I want as many newsrooms as possible to be around 3, 5, 20 years from now and using stats to help make sure this happens is something we (and AOL and a growing list) believe in.
Watch out for a big transition to data driven reporting in the coming years. Can’t wait.
