How Many Audiences Can You Measure?

Building on our original findings in 2010 about audience loyalty, scout® research has been looking into what creates loyalty. Understanding the nature of loyalty, would obviously allow a publisher to nurture and grow the audience. For instance, is a fan a fan because she reads all the homepage articles? Or is she a fan because of a certain section of content? So what did we find out?

Site-wide fans typically make up 20-30% of the visitors. Site-wide fans are the ones with a broad reading habit. Think of them as the cover-to-cover reader. In contrast when you analyze most fans’ behavior to figure out what they are a “fans of”, it is typical to find an individual fan has an affinity for a specific section of content. The figure to the right shows a sample fan-of analysis where 28% of audience is a site-wide fan reading a variety of content but 72% of fans are fans of specific sections.

Looking deeper into this sample, a full 51% are fans of a single section, and another 14% are fans of two sections. That means nearly 2/3 of the fans are fans of one or two sections.

What is the implication? The implication is that a publisher has multiple niche audiences rather than a single audience. Each of these audiences engages for different reasons, and the requirement for personalization increases. Rather than one editorial with one homepage, there needs to be multiple editorial streams with multiple homepages, twitter feeds, e-mail distribution, etc. Rather than one audience development effort, there are multiple targets and campaigns. Rather than one set of ad inventory for sale, there are multiple inventories that can be marketed to different niches of advertisers.

While print publishers never saw their audience as homogeneous, they did not have to mass customize their editorial, audience development, and sales to serve the audience. In digital, visitor behavior segments your readers into multiple audiences leading to personalized content delivery for increased engagement and loyalty. All you have to do is look at Flipboard, Twitter, or other social media platforms to see how specialized and personal each reader expects content to be. The notion of an audience served by ONE editorial, ONE audience development and ONE ad sales has reached the end. How many audiences can you measure?