This panel on newspapers and other traditional media covers a topic that I have been writing about a good bit on this blog. Here is an excerpt from the panel description: "The 100 year plus industry has hemorrhaged profitability and good, talented people, and been forced to re-evaluate its entire business model. The Internet as a whole has started to progress beyond the two-way Web and into a real-time Web, and content producers no matter how big or small, must be ready to deploy measurement models to help make relevant content publishing decisions and in turn drive ad revenue."
The speakers include: Sam Whitmore (moderator), Alan Citron (Buzzmetrics), Lewis Vorkin (True Slant), and Paul Berry (Huffington Post).
Sam is the founder and editor of Sam Wittmore's Media Survey. He pointed out how the Web has made us all potential publishers. The panel discussed the role of analytics in the publishing world.
Alan said that one of the things you have to master as a startup is analytics, You have to pick carefully with the budget of a startup. They primarily look at macrotrends. They have 40 sites and need to look over all of them. They cluster their sites where commonalities might apply. They are now experimenting to make their middle pages like mini-home pages to keep people there and to attract ads placed there. Mobile is important but determining how to monetize mobile is still an issue.
The Huffington Post recently passed the Washington Post, the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal in number of readers. When Pual started three years ago they only had Sitemetter - a free primitive tool I used to use for this blog They were underfunded at the time for their goals so they had to be careful. They built some tools themselves. Now they can see how they are doing on an hourly basis and everyone is addicted to these stats. He said that tools need to be intuitive so everyone can use them and not just a few experts.
Paul said they look at the stories and what people care about to support optimization. They also constantly test features to see what headlines work better by putting up different combinations and making adjustments. These efforts are improving their bounce rate. This constant attention and adjustments of place and titles by editors stands in stark contrast to the print newspaper editors who decide once and day and throw stuff on your step with few ways to see what you do with the paper.
Paul said they are looking for brave brands for ads. They have applied sentiment analysis of their comments to give themselves and brands a better picture of what is happening and how engagement is working. To keep people on the site they have business in the front and party stuff in the back. The back pages get a lot of traffic. I know this myself as I have been tempted to go back for the party stuff after going to the front page for a more serious news story.
Paul said that people love thumbnails and good headlines. They try to use these to get people exploring their site. He also said that they believe in the scroll. You do not need to be above the fold on a Web page but rather in the story. Paul said they support mobile devices and the analytics with mobile is similar. They are spending a lot of time looking at how their stories look on mobile. This places a strain on the organization to be constantly checking this.
Lewis has over 300 member journalists on True Slant. He went from traditional media to AOL several years ago. At AOL data was important but they did not have the right data. Then he moved on to found Trueslant to support traditional journalists to move into digital publishing. These journalists did not know about the data possibilities in digital. You need to take advantage of the data that is now available They cannot build these analytics tools themselves although they did some of this at first. Lewis said that page views are not useful. The real metrics are more like time spent, comments, repeat commentors, Coming up with right metrics and seeing then constantly is the key,
Forbes Media is one of the investors in his firm and they can bring in CMOs for discussion sessions. At a recent event all the CMOs wanted to talk about was social media. Measuring social media is an important next step. Research into a viewer's path is key but hard to do. Mobile is the future of news but they have not gone there yet. Lewis agreed with Alan that there remain monetization issues with digital.
This was useful session. The Huffington Post example certainly shows the power of making good use of the data available with digital media. We have written here how traditional media needs to get more creative as they respond to social media. Analytics is a necessity in this effort.