Measuring the number of page views as a key performance indicator (KPI), is a growing practice among publishers. In fact, editorial and development teams are increasingly being rewarded for boosting page views, with some publishers even shaping their entire site just to generate page views. That is not a business model! Let me prove it with an extreme example. Any publisher can deploy bots to generate page views for their site. No advertiser will pay for those page views, because the page views have no advertising value. While page views could be used as a KPI by the editorial team to generate more content for bot consumption, no revenue is coming through the door to keep them employed. The right metric for publishers […]
Archive | May, 2011
Total Disaggregation: The 80/20 Rule of Online News
This is the final post in my series about the transition of print newspapers to online news. In print news, distribution costs led to scarcity, allowing publishers to create an audience and a marketplace for advertisers. Online distribution costs are nearly free, producing massive competition for audience engagement and a disaggregation of the newspaper business model. In addition to new competition for audience engagement from social networking and games, news publishers have to increasingly compete with themselves – the total disaggregation of the newspaper business model. This becomes clear when examining the articles read by an online-news audience. Rather than purchase multiple newspapers, print news readers consume local, regional, national, and international news from one paper. In online news however, […]
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