January 4th, 2007
Time To Tear Down The Wall Between Page Views And Feed Views
With the launch of its new (and very well executed) site statitistics offering, Feedburner is perfectly positioned to push forward a desperately needed evolution in web metrics — abolish the distinction between page views and feed views. From an analytic persepctive, of course I want to know how many people read my content on the site vs. in a feed reader, but from a big picture perspective, I want to know how many people read my posts, regardless of where they read it.
How about a new metric called “content views,” which is agnostic to where or how content is viewed. Content views would integrate feed and site reading. It would do away with the silly game of giving extra “view” credit for forcing users to click through to get to more of the content. It could be adapted for audio and video, which has a time dimension.
Regardless, there’s a big, fat opportunity here just waiting to be seized.
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Hi Scott, we are definitely thinking about things this way, a content-centric view of statistics instead of an endpoint-centric (or whatever you want to call site v feed v widget) view of statistics. It’s a very interesting opportunity, and of course it presents a bunch of challenges as well. We’ll see how quickly we can get there.
[…] Tiscali has just released the results of its first TV trends report. Now that the Italian telecoms firm has taken over IPTV firm Homechoice in the UK, they need to know these kind of things. Predictably, the term “IPTV” mystified most people, but once they know what it is, they seem to like it. Around 42% of the people surveyed for the report said traditional TV schedules won’t exist in ten years. No Radio Times? Surely not! Twenty-five percent of people said a new wave of smaller, specialist, on-demand TV services will make it harder for the major broadcasters to survive. Though there’s clearly a demand for the flexibility of on-demand, it’s still not entirely rosy: 42% of people that watch on-demand actually watch less TV as a result. But maybe they can just pick out what they really want, rather than sticking the telly on in the background while they wait for the show they like? Around 17% of people are already viewing on-demand content and movies, soaps and sports would be the biggest incentive for the people that haven’t tried it yet. There was a geographical bias too: 28% of Londoners have watched on-demand content via broadband compared to just 12% in Wales and Northern Ireland. Tiscali’s MD for media services Neal McCleave told me there’s a need to educate people more about IPTV. He said that though 63% that would prefer on-demand, the other 37% don’t understand what it is - if they did, they would want it too. “Those 37% need education. If you tell and show them what this is all about they immediately want it,” he said. The growing number of services entering the market, BT Vision, Sky Plus and Tiscali/Homechoice, are quickly raising the profile of on-demand services. “It’s snowballing very rapidly and that will contribute to the awareness and use of on-demand in the next 12-24 months. The 17% of people that have already downloaded on-demand content will become 100% overtime.” If you’re about to bemoan the demise of the TV scheduler, don’t bother. She’ll still be there - for lazy TV watchers. “There will always be a need for linear TV, for when you want to sit in front of the TV and not think. It’s partly a generational thing,” said McCleave. And it’s partly a sports thing. Major live events will still be a gather-round-thescreen experience while the event i live, and that’s something on-demand won’t change at all. • The problem of tracking your RSS readers RSS - I love it. Can’t get enough of it. The problem for bloggers, though, is that it’s harder to track how many people read your blog entries on your RSS feed than if they just come to your site. Most news sites offer up just a headline and standfirst, but you have to click through to the site to read the whole piece. Blogs, however, tend to set up their feeds to offer a headline and then the full post of the entry. The benefit is for the reader really because if you reader a huge number of blog entries, it takes less clicks and less visual adjustment to read everything with your RSS reader. But that means people can read an entries post without visiting a site, which causes problems for audience measurement. Feedburner offers various RSS tools including counters, and just launched a new, free site stats tool that allows publishers to track both feed and site audience. But as Scott Karp pointed out, there’s an opportunity here for a new “content views” metric that would combine both of those. From an analytic persepctive, of course I want to know how many people read my content on the site vs. in a feed reader, but from a big picture perspective, I want to know how many people read my posts, regardless of where they read it. Content views would integrate feed and site reading. It would do away with the silly game of giving extra “view†credit for forcing users to click through to get to more of the content. It could be adapted for audio and video, which has a time dimension. Feedburner’s Dick Costolo replied to Scott, saying there are a number of challenges (I guess not least duplication between readers that start on RSS and then move to the site?) but that they are working on it. We are definitely thinking about things this way, a content-centric view of statistics instead of an endpoint-centric (or whatever you want to call site v feed v widget) view of statistics. […]
[…] Publishing 2.0 is forward-looking enough to posit a future where we can finally drop the vocabulary that often confuses conversations about how “popular” a site is and move to “a new metric called ‘content views,’ which is agnostic to where or how content is viewed.” […]
on-site page views and another to track RSS subscribers, this is the first time a comprehensive service has been offered that allows publishers to get a bird’s eye view of all site visitors in one place. Publishing 2.0 is forward-looking enough to posit a future where we can finally drop the vocabulary that often confuses conversations about how “popular” a site is and move to “a new metric called ‘content views,’ which is agnostic to where or how content is viewed.”
The idea of ‘content views’ is one that’s been around the offline publishing world for a long time… it’s called ‘reach’. They may print only 50,000 magazines and have only 32,000 subscribers but somehow (through doctors offices, work environments, bus stops, etc.) the ‘reach’ can be 100,000+ - it affects everything from prestige to the amount they can charge for advertising.
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If ‘content views’ is the priority, ‘reach’ should be the extra bonus… the icing on the cake. The only way I can think to do this is through summations (or mentions) on others blogs. For instance, in the post “Blogs Have A Small Problem with Small CPM’s” I may not have gone over to read Chris Anderson’s original article - but I received the summary of his thoughts from that post. That’s ‘reach’ and it should be considered in some metric. Whether taking audience totals from each site which mentioned it through trackbacks or… hum… it just needs to be somewhat measurable as to be respectable - no wild claims.
precio? Es factible, ya que no se tratará de contenido optimizado para buscadores, sino de textos, audios o vÃdeos a los que llega un lector por un interés real y no por haber seguido el “engaño” de un motor de búsqueda. Interesante… Gracias, Scott. Tags: PR, RRPP, Public Relations, Relaciones Públicas, Comunicación Corporativa, Corporate Communications
on-site page views and another to track RSS subscribers, this is the first time a comprehensive service has been offered that allows publishers to get a bird’s eye view of all site visitors in one place. Publishing 2.0 is forward-looking enough to posit a future where we can finally drop the vocabulary that often confuses conversations about how “popular†a site is and move to “a new metric called ‘content views,’ which is agnostic to where or how content is viewed.
[…] by ebenthurston on January 5th, 2007 Scott Karp says: How about a new metric called “content views,†which is agnostic to where or how content […]
[…] the past year, people like Jeremiah Owyang, Kami Huyse, Scott Karp, Christopher Carfi, Mike Manuel, the Research Fellows at the Society for New Communications […]