The irony of expectations
This flood of data from different sources has resulted in a level of complexity that can be difficult to manage. The key selling point of digital media remains the ability to track consumer behavior: which pages were viewed, which banners were clicked, and when this viewing and clicking produced an “action” such as a request for information or an online purchase. In practice, though, making sense of the massive amounts of data collected is hard work. Tom Heslin, senior vice president and executive editor of the Providence Journal, calls this the “irony of expectations”: neither publishers nor advertisers have been able to keep up with the flood of data. “Our biggest challenge is to simplify solutions for our clients, even for national advertisers,” he explains. “The development of metrics has far outstripped knowledge of ad buyers and sellers. There is a real disconnect between the technology and how it can be applied and used.” The main effect of the rising tide of information has been to increase uncertainty among advertisers as well as publishers, according to Rick Hirsch, multimedia editor of the Miami Herald. “Ironically itʹs still like being a traditional editor making calls based on your gut instinct — you have more data, but itʹs conflicting,” he explains. Hirsch says server data (analyzed via Omniture) gives him some idea of what share of his overall audience comes from Miami rather than from the Caribbean or Latino communities in other parts of the U.S. (This is based on visitors’ IP addresses.) However, he has no way to match that data to particular stories. As a result, for instance, Hirsch can’t confirm his suspicion that a core Herald audience consists of government employees working in Miami, which would argue for augmenting that beat. Likewise, he is unsure how much to invest in edgy video projects because he doesn’t know whom they appeal to. The Web‐native news site Talking Points Memo offered a dramatic illustration of the abundance of information available today. TPM has been beta‐testing a new server analytics package, Chartbeat, which offers a detailed real‐time picture of the last 15 seconds of activity at the popular site. The software provides an instrument panel with a minute‐by‐minute picture of what articles people are reading, how far into each piece they read, which pieces they’re commenting on, what readers are searching for on the site, who’s linking to the site from elsewhere on the Web, and what people are saying about TPM on Twitter, among other data. “I’ve been working on the Web for 15 years, but this blew my mind,” declares Kourosh Karimkhany, COO of TPM Media. “It was a real epiphany.” Karimkhany says that the real‐time information is having a dramatic impact on editorial and design decisions, for instance by revealing exactly where readers drop off in each story (halfway down a page, there’s almost no audience left) and by challenging expectations about which breaking stories deserve top billing. For instance, editors were surprised to see news of Al and Tipper Gore’s divorce (even before a Portland masseuse came into the story) outperforming the political bombshell about General Stanley McChrystal’s profile in Rolling Stone, and moved the divorce story into a more prominent spot. Measurement companies themselves appreciate the systemic effect produced by the many kinds of audience data now available. Marketing copy from comScore concedes the point frankly: “The frequent disparity between census‐based site analytics data and panel‐based audience measurement data has long been the Achille’s heel of digital media measurement. Because the two measurement techniques have different objectives, they employ different counting technologies, which often results in differing metrics that can cause confusion and uncertainty among publishers and advertisers.”9agrees that more information hasn’t always yielded greater clarity. “Digital media is much more complicated. There are many more things that are measurable. There are many more moving parts,” he says. “It’s not always agreed upon what is the most important thing to measure, and what those measurements mean or how they should be applied.” This complexity does not appear likely to abate in the near future. If anything, the variety of audience measures available seems to be increasing as sites and advertisers try to accommodate mobile devices such as smartphones and e‐books.