Archive | Advertising

The Only Thing Worse Than A Fly-By…

…is a scraper! Or at least scrapers that aren’t monetized properly. Scrapers are users or automated services that systematically consume media content – especially news. Their motivations are usually commercial in nature such as a media monitoring service, advertising verification, or lead sourcing. A scraper can be identified by the fact that their volume of consumption is several standard deviations or more higher compared to the rest of the audience – even compared to fans. It’s not uncommon for scrapers to make up less than 0.1 percent of an audience and generate 10-15 percent or more of the page views (i.e., ad inventory and revenue capacity). The graph to the right illustrates the behavioral difference between the largest segment of […]

Building a Loyal Audience? That’s a Business Model!

As I pointed out in my previous post, advertisers don’t buy page views they buy audience. A publisher’s business model has to produce and monetize an audience. So what kind of audience is profitable? A loyal one. Here is the proof… The Revenue Model Because audience engagement is the unit of monetization and because each member engages differently, the revenue contribution and profitability of each audience member varies. For example, assume a fly-by audience member generates on average three page views. With a $30 RPM, each fly-by is worth $0.09 in revenue. Now compare that to a loyal fan generating 100 page views a month or $3 of revenue per month (i.e., $36 per year). The revenue model can be plotted as […]

Counting Page Views? Don’t Call It A Business Model!

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 […]

SEO is for Suckers

Richard Tofel’s post this week about how digital news will be better when publishers move beyond SEO was an interesting op-ed, but most of the debate seemed philosophical as opposed to factual. Our advice to publishers: SEO is for audience development, not revenue (that could have been a softer title for this post). Here are the facts behind that recommendation. Fact: Loyal audience members do not use search as a means to engage with publishers. The striking difference between fans and fly-bys is the percentage of visits that are based on direct vs. search. Upwards of 95 percent of fly-by visits are generated from a search whereas upwards of 70 percent of fan visits are direct. Of the fan visits […]