Guiding media innovators toward solutions, around the world
Measuring the wrong thing or using the wrong scale is a formula for failure Numbers don’t lie, but people do. And worst of all, people lie to themselves about what numbers mean. The Big Lie in media metrics for years was the Biggest Number. Media publishers got away with touting their total monthly page views […]
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Focusing on the right metrics helped a news organization navigate a leadership crisis Back when newspapers had their headquarters in office towers, editors used to say that their most valuable assets went down the elevators every night. They were referring to their journalists, but they were overlooking other important human assets. If an independent news […]
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A cynic might say that Google’s current efforts to help news publishers is a public relations ploy to get good press and appease anti-monopoly regulators in Europe and the US. After all, Google has more than 30% of all digital advertising globally, followed closely by Facebook with 20%. And these two companies, more than any […]
Read More »Amid all the news about how Facebook and Google are devouring the world, I would like to sound a note of optimism for digital news media. But first, let’s acknowledge the bad news. It is true that the munch munch munch you are hearing is the sound of the Internet giants biting off big slices of […]
Read More »Anyone who has studied the metrics of the internet in any detail knows about the Big Lie: those big numbers of total users and page views that everyone relies on are practically meaningless. More than half of the visitors to websites stay for less than 15 seconds. Three-fourths of the users of the most important […]
Read More »According to eMarketer, half the digital ad spending this year will be on mobile, a total of $29 billion. Advertisers want to know if their messages are reaching the right target groups of people at the right time so that ad dollars are not wasted. Some people are better targets than others for messages about, […]
Read More »Versión en español aquí. The two most important traffic measurements for news entrepreneurs are NOT unique visitors and page views. Those numbers can mislead you. They count people who arrive at your website by accident or search, glance at a page and leave. As Ken Doctor has so eloquently put it: “Unique visitors are a […]
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