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Who’s in control? Taking back ownership of your audience
In research conducted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, “newsroom personnel at every level expressed anxiety about loss of control over the destination of stories, the power of their brand, and their outlets’ relationship with the viewer or reader.” The consequences of a lack of control include challenges like monetization…
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Track AMP & Facebook Instant like never before
When we spoke with some of our customers who publish content on AMP and Facebook Instant Articles (FBIA) we learned that there’s very little understanding of what actually works on these distributed channels. “Platforms are about picking up eyeballs wherever we can get them; there’s no real defined strategy,” said one analytics editor. That amorphous…
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Episode 03: Long Live Long-form
“So, our attention span isn’t getting killed?” Andrew and Sachin take a look at engaged time data that shows we have a greater attention span for news content than what traditional bounce rate suggests. If someone visits one page on a website and bounces, they didn’t necessarily have a bad experience—in fact, they probably had…
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Episode 02: Search Intent vs. Social Serendipity
“The war for people’s time” Sachin and Andrew talk about optimism for digital subscription models, implications of the DNAinfo and Gothamist shut down, and how four big tech companies (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google) have changed the web. They dig further into how we find content on Facebook and Google, decoding data behind the traffic…
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Episode 01: The Great Reckoning
“The ad only internet is basically a thing of the past.” In the very first episode of The Center of Attention, Sachin and Andrew discuss the current pivotal state of the attention economy. In what Andrew calls “the Great Reckoning” in digital attention, brands and publishers are converging in how they serve their audiences. They…
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Facebook declines, Google grows as battle for news audiences continues
As an analytics provider for hundreds of the web’s leading publishers, we have a bird’s-eye view of trends in web-wide news consumption. This vantage revealed an industry-wide shift in how readers find news in June 2015. Facebook overtook Google as the most important traffic source for publishers. And then, for two years the situation remained…
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Media could double the amount of subscribers in 2018
War metaphors are common in the way we talk about the attention economy, encapsulated in headlines like: “The battle for consumers’ attention” (The Economist); “The media war for your attention” (Axios); and, recently, “Future of Tech and Media: Waging a War for People’s Time” (The Wall Street Journal). Like in American Gods or Wonder Woman,…
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Aren’t you glad you adopted AMP? Google referrals up 17% on the year with AMP traffic.
When Google announced AMP almost two years ago, the media industry responded with cautious optimism, but some trepidation. Adopting new platforms requires a risk/reward calculation from publishers: how much time/resources do you want to spend for the benefit that’s promised, but isn’t guaranteed. For those that took the risk on Google AMP, that risk appears…
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How four newsrooms actually used data—and you can, too
While 87% of publishers have access to data analytics for the content their organization creates, only half report complete understanding of those analytics. And, according to a recent ICFJ survey, less than half of newsrooms consult analytics daily. For analytics to make an impact though, teams need to go from passive observers of site traffic…
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Why Slate picked engaged time as their North Star metric
To get all the details on how Slate became a loyalty powerhouse, check out this case study. On their 20th birthday last September, the digital magazine Slate reported 17,000 paying subscribers for their membership program, Slate Plus. Today, that number is at 35,000. The surge in subscribers owes in part to the Trump bump—Slate Plus…