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.