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I was reading an article in the New York Times, which suggest that work place burnout, starts at a younger age, in the world of online news media. I do not agree with the article’s main point, but I instantly fell in love with the authors examples of ruthless environments, a perverse opposite of the intent I guess. He assembles some of the pioneers in the marriage of Data and News Media. Find a pool of excerpts from the article.
My point is this, some verticals, such as News Media, are not rational in nature, and as such, we cannot fairly expect our rational models to be instant true. I still believe that we (the industry) can and will succeed in increasing performance, and the above notion, is thus nothing more than a cautionary note-to-self on assuring anything I do, take that into consideration. If not directly built into a model, we should certainly accept a margin of perhaps not inaccuracy, but conceivably a performance decrease from what was to expect.
I have strong opinions about the importance of setting proper KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and applying appropriate subsequent optimization goals. In my assumption, that we are somewhat in agreement on the former, I believe it is fair to suggest that Article Views are a much stronger metric than Page Views. – AND If I were to run a News Media organization, I would choose Daily Unique Article Views as my primary success metric. Think about it – and do let me know why your organization is not using Article Views over Page Views ?
I Just returned from Madrid, where I did the keynote at the wonderful web analytics conference, practitioner web analytics. The conference was announced and promoted as a conference for data driven professionals – which I took very literally and went all in with a rather geeky presentation (at first sight). I do believe though, that choosing your optimization goals is not taken as seriously as it should be by most analytics teams (whether internal or external). Find my slides embedded.
As I was traversing a set of data from Nielsen today, and with the recent indication of the New York Times metered solution in mind, I came to think about the worth of an online non-subscribed news reader per month. I wanted a sound bite, I could use when debating the topic of pay walls, with other folks in the Analytics and news media industry. Find below, a value indication, but be a bit lighthearted about it (this is no research conclusion – and it is probably a bit unfair to multiply Nielsen and Jeff Jarvis numbers out of context), nevertheless, here we go.
News Personalization is agreeable a technology challenge, and certainly one that have not yet been solved, but news personalization it also a potential social challenge for the community. When personalizing content, research shows that there are large optimization opportunities in using dimensions such as race, income and education (and similar aggressive demographic dimensions). If this type of personalization is used violently, it is easy to envision a scenario, where the enlightened and well educated population keep getting wiser and the uninformed and likely uneducated population stay just that.
I recently talked about how Analytics is building the Newsroom of the Future – and posted a set of excerpts from a BusinessWeek Article about how AOL was perhaps moving towards that promised data driven Newsroom. Ironic perhaps, but the New York Times just ran a story on Bloomberg’s acquisition of BusinessWeek, and more importantly for this debate, some of the analytics processes imposed on BusinessWeek writers.
..Continuing down the rabbit hole, trying to figure out how Data and Analytics can help publisher increase their current performance. Standardization might not look like much of a performance or optimization technique, but not knowing clearly what your are optimizing against, makes the task not only difficult, but also dangerous to the point where you can make more harm than good on certain initiatives. So the laissez-faire metric attitude, should be exchanged for well defined and understood online publisher metrics.
Demographic data in Yahoo! Web Analytics do not precisely represent the overall traffic for Czech websites, but they do seem to be very precise for the many visitors identified through a Yahoo! ID / Cookie. Therefore my conclusion is that, these valuable demographic data points can indeed be utilized in segmentation and analysis of your website visitors – even if they primarily come from small countries such as the Czech Republic
I am sure we all understand by now, that parts of the News Media industry are in utter disarray, and that this is primarily due to the fact that monetization of their products has changed drastically.
In my opinion and as we examine Online News Media, it very much seems like there is a mixed understanding of the actually currency in which the reader can pay for the product. If we focus on the statement, that it is always the actual newsreader who pays, something which I very much believe to be true, we should conclude on the currency in which he pays, before we even debate the actual monetization strategy.
