Tag Archives | Audience Development

The Anonymous Audience: An Anchor on the Revenue Model

The anonymous audience is a revenue anchor that pulls down business performance for media publishers. A behavioral analysis of fly-by visitors highlights just how much of a drag they are on the revenue model. A robust revenue model creates multiple streams of revenue from an audience member. The revenue potential of an audience member is defined by both the engagement behavior with media (i.e., advertising revenue) and the purchase behavior for events, daily deals, commerce, or subscriptions (i.e., direct revenue). To quantify the revenue drag of the anonymous audience, Scout Research analyzed the revenue potential of an anonymous visitor compared to a registered visitor at every level of loyalty (i.e., fly-bys, occasionals, regulars, and fans). The infographic to the right […]

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 […]

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 […]

The ARPU Equation for Drive-bys

Posted by: Matt Shanahan Drive-bys can be a majority or a minority of the audience depending on the publisher’s attitude towards SEO, social networking, and other traffic driving techniques. Understanding the weight and priority of drive-by ARPU versus ARPU of other audience segments can provide insight into a publishers strategy. So this post looks at the ARPU equation for drive-bys. For most media publishers, the audience can be broken up into four segments: fans, regulars, occasionals, and drive-bys. The qualification of an audience member into one of the four groups is based on an engagement metric that can vary between publishers but is usually time on site. The Scout Analytics definition for drive-by is that the individual’s time on site is not predictable during a […]