Real vs. Imagined: Reconsidering @USAToday vs. @WSJ
Earlier today, I tweeted a photo, showing how the pile of newspapers at a Hyatt hotel indicated more guests were grabbing USA Today.
It would be easy to simply say, "well, that shows that USA Today is more popular than the Wall Street Journal," and extrapolate from there to think the former is in better shape. What else would I consider, though, to reach a more realistic inference? First of all, who says that guests of the Hyatt Hotel in Medford, MA (where I was on a visit to the Boston area), are the types of people who read The Wall Street Journal or who want to? Who says the WSJ is even targeted to the same profile of reader?
Or, perhaps, WSJ is farther ahead in adoption of its app. I already subscribe to the Journal, for example, and therefore can consume the paper on my digital devices without having to pick up a "paper." Last night, I looked at USA Today on their nifty HTML5-optimized site, on my iPad. So, no paper for me -- though I did grab one to read by the pool and another to help with a little cleanup (please don't make me explain).
Also, simple numbers of readers don't always tell the story. Even if WSJ has less mass appeal, that doesn't mean they're doing worse. I haven't looked into real ad rates for WSJ in a couple of years, but I would guess they are, on a per-unit average throughout the paper and website, higher than those at USA Today. Overall revenue may be higher even if there is a smaller number of readers. Said another way, a smaller number of more highly valued users can mean better business.
Finally, most obviously, no matter how many hotels I personally see this happen at in my seemingly random travels, it's far from a random sample. We can't really draw inferences about the overall health or desirability of a newspaper by looking at piles of them on the front desk of a hotel Dorian happens to visit.
So, good Tweet, but not far from foregone conclusion.
Same pattern each day at Boston area hotel: @usatoday depleted faster than @wsj cc: @lkramer twitpic.com/cgqcrz
— Dorian Benkoil (@dbenk) April 3, 2013
It would be easy to simply say, "well, that shows that USA Today is more popular than the Wall Street Journal," and extrapolate from there to think the former is in better shape. What else would I consider, though, to reach a more realistic inference? First of all, who says that guests of the Hyatt Hotel in Medford, MA (where I was on a visit to the Boston area), are the types of people who read The Wall Street Journal or who want to? Who says the WSJ is even targeted to the same profile of reader?
Or, perhaps, WSJ is farther ahead in adoption of its app. I already subscribe to the Journal, for example, and therefore can consume the paper on my digital devices without having to pick up a "paper." Last night, I looked at USA Today on their nifty HTML5-optimized site, on my iPad. So, no paper for me -- though I did grab one to read by the pool and another to help with a little cleanup (please don't make me explain).
Also, simple numbers of readers don't always tell the story. Even if WSJ has less mass appeal, that doesn't mean they're doing worse. I haven't looked into real ad rates for WSJ in a couple of years, but I would guess they are, on a per-unit average throughout the paper and website, higher than those at USA Today. Overall revenue may be higher even if there is a smaller number of readers. Said another way, a smaller number of more highly valued users can mean better business.
Finally, most obviously, no matter how many hotels I personally see this happen at in my seemingly random travels, it's far from a random sample. We can't really draw inferences about the overall health or desirability of a newspaper by looking at piles of them on the front desk of a hotel Dorian happens to visit.
So, good Tweet, but not far from foregone conclusion.
ROI of Social Media (#ROISM) Roundup - Social Media Weekend (#SMWKND)
Here, below, is a Storify roundup of the panel I helped assemble and moderated for Social Media Weekend (#smwknd), titled "Social Media and the Bottom Line". It was, in a way, dropping the other shoe on a talk I gave the previous two #SMwknds titled "The ROI of Social Media" (presentation here), which covered ways you can figure out if you're making as much from social media as you spend executing it.
It's important to sometimes do some hard-headed analysis and figure out if, amid the buzz and excitement, the costreally really justifies the effort and expense. (I try to apply both right- and left-brain, creativity and analysis, to my work.) This year, I thought, it would be good to invite folks who -- like most of my clients -- have to justify the expense.
We were very fortunate (in large part thanks to Columbia U's @sree, a longtime colleague and friend) to have Eason Jordan, head of Now This News, Jonathan Perelman of Buzzfeed and Zach Seward of Quartz -- who did abashedly note he is really an editorial, not business guy, but had a great managerial and operational view, as did all the panelists.
What jumped out to me as a common theme was that these new news organizations (two of which -- NTN and Quartz -- launched last fall) had social so imbued into their thinking and processes, that it was not even a question of whether they could cost-justify social media, but rather that if they didn't succeed in social, they would not be a success. These three, at least, get it -- get that they are not homepage-first media, that people discover and consume media (or "content" if you prefer) when, where and how they want: on whatever screens, through whatever feeds, via whatever social or other mechanisms make the most sense to them. That for all their communities, a recommendation or referral from a friend or connection is often what makes it valuable enough to look at, and share further. Jonathan even shared a graphic (we can ask if it's ok to publish it) of how much virality they can measure on a piece, how much added traffic social sharing can get them beyond any publishing they do.
I've peppered the below with comments and observations that I hope elucidate the Tweets. Reading them, you'll get a good sense of what was covered.
It's important to sometimes do some hard-headed analysis and figure out if, amid the buzz and excitement, the cost
We were very fortunate (in large part thanks to Columbia U's @sree, a longtime colleague and friend) to have Eason Jordan, head of Now This News, Jonathan Perelman of Buzzfeed and Zach Seward of Quartz -- who did abashedly note he is really an editorial, not business guy, but had a great managerial and operational view, as did all the panelists.
What jumped out to me as a common theme was that these new news organizations (two of which -- NTN and Quartz -- launched last fall) had social so imbued into their thinking and processes, that it was not even a question of whether they could cost-justify social media, but rather that if they didn't succeed in social, they would not be a success. These three, at least, get it -- get that they are not homepage-first media, that people discover and consume media (or "content" if you prefer) when, where and how they want: on whatever screens, through whatever feeds, via whatever social or other mechanisms make the most sense to them. That for all their communities, a recommendation or referral from a friend or connection is often what makes it valuable enough to look at, and share further. Jonathan even shared a graphic (we can ask if it's ok to publish it) of how much virality they can measure on a piece, how much added traffic social sharing can get them beyond any publishing they do.
I've peppered the below with comments and observations that I hope elucidate the Tweets. Reading them, you'll get a good sense of what was covered.
Twitter Allows Ads From Others -- For How Long?
As GigaOm's PaidContent reports:
The Associated Press is running sponsored tweets as part of a deal with Samsung during the Consumer Electronics Show. While this is allowed under Twitter’s rules, it also clearly threatens the network’s future as an advertising medium. How long will it allow this to continue?
I have sold ads into a media property's Twitter stream, and have wondered when the day could come when Twitter taps us on the shoulder. My hope is that they're smart enough to make it a win-win, so that we can continue to place the ads, and Twitter takes a small proportion, rather than shutting it down and forcing the client to go to them. That would not only hurt us , but also potentially our client (whose needs we understand) and Twitter (which might just lose the potential revenue, as well as fostering the development of "conversational advertising").
Cross-Media Measurement: Sort Of
This one from @FredWilson caught my eye. At first I got excited, then discouraged, then had a mixed (and more nuanced, I hope) reaction. I got excited because I thought media measurement firm comScore was finally going solve the holy grail of measurement across platforms -- meaning not just digital, but everything: TV, Web, radio, etc. I've been working on a sponsored white paper (early chapters here), during which it's become clear to me that while TV is the big kahuna, digital would get more ad revenue if it could better quantify a) unduplicated audience/community and b) cross-platform impact across media. Yes, OPA and others have done individual studies, but we lack a continued consistent metric that provides, say, a trailing average over time.
comScore, according to Fred, is measuring across computer and mobile screens only, alas. Well, it's beginning. Correlating the two, we get a sense of what media/tech properties are up, down, rising and falling in each, and can put them in relative context. We see, for example, that Google is the 800-lb gorilla. Period. Though there is a lot of duplication of users, their mobile strategy seems to have made them dominant into the future.
The real measurement, though, would look not at computer screens vs. an insufficient lumping together of mobile, but rather at experience, which is really more relevant for media consumption (and, by extension, commercial effect). Let's say we could, within the bounds of protecting privacy, tell not just on what platform someone is consuming but how. Watching on a TV in the living room is from the smaller older screen in the kitchen. An hour-long show on Hulu or Netflix is different from clips YouTube, regardless the screen. And so on.
Plus, we in media have to acknowledge that no matter how good we get at this stuff, perfection is infinitely far away: You can get closer by halving the distance, but you'll never arrive. No matter the measurement you really can't tell exactly what's going on, especially in the ever-important long tail that in aggregate can be a big swathe of consumption.
Let me use my media consumption for the past 24 hours as an example that I hope makes a larger point. Last night, I wanted to catch up on The Daily Show, so I logged on via their iPad app, which informed me there'd been an interview with Warren Buffett and a financial journalist but which the app didn't offer. Using the Splashtop app on the iPad, I accessed my desktop computer and through the iPad watched the interview on The Daily Show website. comSscore might have registered that as a computer view, but it was really on mobile. I use Splashtop much the same way on Kindle Fire which is about half the size of iPad and yet another experience. I have even set up my bedroom's VCR (yep, I still have one) to tape future episodes of the show and will now be able to (untracked) watch at my leisure and fast forward through parts that may not interest me, including any commercials. I'll also be able to grab that cassette and play it at my mom's house (with less hassle than if I created an mp4 from my Mac's DVR), or trying to deal with DRM issues if I bought it.
While I'm probably an outlier in my habits, I'm normal in the broader view. If something is unavailable one way (for example, via an app), people will find another (as Wilson demonstrated during the blackout of Knick games by Time Warner cable when he went to an illicit German site). People will find ways to sling media, too. What may be registered as a view on one screen is actually consumption on another, perhaps time-shifted. Much is untrackable, not to mention various logons, cookie deletion and tracking blockers, and so on. Measuring the aggregate helps but it misses a significant part of the picture in our multi-device, multi-habit tech-laden world. New forms of ad targeting (such as explored in that white paper), demand much finer detail.
This is not to in any way call into doubt the utility of what Comscore, Nielsen and some others are trying to do in trying to measure across media and platforms. It is, though, important to understand the limits and that the experience of how media are consumed can be quite different from the ways in which they are measured. There are challenges here which also spell opportunity for entrepreneurs.
= = = = =
The top of Fred's original post:
A VC: Media Metrix Multi PlatformcomScore is announcing something today that I am quite excited about. It is called Media Metrix Multi Platform and comScore describes it this way in their announcement: "Media Metrix Multi Platform offers unduplicated accounting of audience size and demographics that reflects today’s multi-platform digital media environment, which includes websites, apps and video content accessed from multiple devices."
This "multi platform" environment is the reality of most online properties today. We access them on the desktop/web, the mobile web, and on iOS and Android apps (and some other ways as well). But it has been impossible to get an aggregated and, importantly, an unduplicated view of the audience across all of these devices.
Magazines: Can We Include Digital? Please?
While magazines still consider their print editions as flagships, most understand that they are really media brands of which print is only a part.
We also need to see circulation figures. For most magazines, newsstand sales -- as opposed to the more even and booked "pre-revenue" of subscriptions -- were always an indicator, but only a sliver. "Staffers at magazines love to say that newsstand sales aren’t an accurate way to portray a title’s health anymore," says Fishbowl NY (which I once managed), "but these numbers have got to raise some concern." Concern. OK. It's true that all the rest suffers if the flagship is, well, flagging; fewer people picking it up, fewer chances to drive people to all those other goodies. Still, Carey says, at Hearst print accounts for 40% of revenues, while digital accounts for 40% and services 20%.
Today's headlines give an incomplete portrayal.
Twitter Owns its API and Can Change the Rules
The beauty of spreading what you have via an API is that others can use that API to build stuff that feeds into and spreads your service. They get value from your data and functionality, you get the benefit of that functionality and can then incorporate it into your main platform, identify great talent, learn new ways off using your service you may not have considered, get more data about usage and patterns and on and on.
And: You own it, the API. You can set the rules, change the rules, decide some level of data is no longer available, or only under certain constraints, or for a fee.
For a company using the API to build on, it can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand you get all that data, get to incorporate it, enhance your platform, do more stuff. Many media companies have built upon Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and more to let them handle everything from commenting logons to location-based services. That's great -- especially when they carry the freight. But as we saw with Twitter's decision to disallow LinkedIn to use Twitter data in its stream, there are risks that what you're using may not always be available. There, too, can be risks that the one providing the API learns more about your users and patterns than you have and use it in the future in ways that may not benefit your users, something I wrote about previously.
What I would recommend for media, then, is by all means, use the APIs and functionality of a Twitter, Foursquare, etc. But be aware that they are gathering data on your users that you may not have access to, and also that they plug may someday be pulled. Be ready for that eventuality, and know how you think you'll handle it in the event that one day you find yourself, like LinkedIn, unable to use what you had previously in the same way. For LinkedIn, it's surely not a fatal blow, perhaps a scratch or scuff -- though we don't know how much they were getting out of the Twitter feeds, and how much they'll lose if people end up having to go to Twitter.com or Twitter-centric apps where before they just lived within LinkedIn.
For you, if you're a media company, how much will you lose if, say, you can no longer let people log onto your comments via Twitter or Facebook can't share your feeds on those services as easily or at no cost. If you have to pay, what's it worth? What is your ROI of social media? How much is each one of your clickthroughs, mentions, pass-alongs worth?
For Twitter, they are balancing their desire to grow and be omnipresent vs. their perception of what their brand is as it becomes more prevalent, and they exercise more control and have more literal and figurative bandwidth to handle more and more themselves, rather than rely on the good graces of an open developer community.
Here's a bit from CBS' coverage of Twitter's cutoff of its feed to LinkedIn, and more than a flinch of developer anger:
And: You own it, the API. You can set the rules, change the rules, decide some level of data is no longer available, or only under certain constraints, or for a fee.
For a company using the API to build on, it can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand you get all that data, get to incorporate it, enhance your platform, do more stuff. Many media companies have built upon Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and more to let them handle everything from commenting logons to location-based services. That's great -- especially when they carry the freight. But as we saw with Twitter's decision to disallow LinkedIn to use Twitter data in its stream, there are risks that what you're using may not always be available. There, too, can be risks that the one providing the API learns more about your users and patterns than you have and use it in the future in ways that may not benefit your users, something I wrote about previously.
What I would recommend for media, then, is by all means, use the APIs and functionality of a Twitter, Foursquare, etc. But be aware that they are gathering data on your users that you may not have access to, and also that they plug may someday be pulled. Be ready for that eventuality, and know how you think you'll handle it in the event that one day you find yourself, like LinkedIn, unable to use what you had previously in the same way. For LinkedIn, it's surely not a fatal blow, perhaps a scratch or scuff -- though we don't know how much they were getting out of the Twitter feeds, and how much they'll lose if people end up having to go to Twitter.com or Twitter-centric apps where before they just lived within LinkedIn.
For you, if you're a media company, how much will you lose if, say, you can no longer let people log onto your comments via Twitter or Facebook can't share your feeds on those services as easily or at no cost. If you have to pay, what's it worth? What is your ROI of social media? How much is each one of your clickthroughs, mentions, pass-alongs worth?
For Twitter, they are balancing their desire to grow and be omnipresent vs. their perception of what their brand is as it becomes more prevalent, and they exercise more control and have more literal and figurative bandwidth to handle more and more themselves, rather than rely on the good graces of an open developer community.
Here's a bit from CBS' coverage of Twitter's cutoff of its feed to LinkedIn, and more than a flinch of developer anger:
The new requirements are meant to encourage developers to build apps on Twitter's website. The company said it would "more thoroughly enforce" its Developer Rules of the Road. Twitter wants to ensure its branding is consistent across the Internet, whether tweets are read on the site or a third-party client.
While the company is cracking down on inconsistency, developers are struggling with the narrowing constraints of integrating with Twitter.
In a March 2011 note to developers, Twitter platform team member, Ryan Sarver said, "developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no."
The challenges of building a program that doesn't mimic Twitter while ensuring consistency across all platforms has raised the ire of developers - some feeling jilted by the company. Their concern is that they have invested time and resources into developing apps for Twitter, only to have the company change the rules of the game.
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