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.

..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 for one think that the newsroom of the future is data driven! Optimization is not about driving towards the lowest possible common denominator, and better performance could as easily push relevance, as compared to the general idea of pushing everybody toward easy digestible celebrity news.