Time To Look For Readers, Not Clicks

paidcontent reporting, Staci D. Kramer:

...It’s fitting that my own reading the last few days has been a new report from the Columbia Journalism School, The Story So Far: What We know About The Business of Digital Journalism (PDF). Writing for the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave and Lucas Graves tell the saga of digital journalism as a business (or a lack of one) from the mid-90s through now. It isn’t all dismal but it isn’t pretty.
And one of the least attractive parts is what so many have done while they’re trying to figure out the business, or when they think they have—chasing the most incremental readers to get hyped traffic numbers to attract certain kinds of advertising or enough clicks to make dollars instead of pennies from Google ads. Outwardly we like to complain about content farms; in reality, a lot of what news outlets are doing to the side of those front-page stories isn’t very different. (That’s not to knock optimizing for search; it’s hard to overestimate the value of doing it right in today’s cluttered content landscape.)
They are trying to make ubiquity and commodity news pay, to make the most out of the fly-bys. In the process, they often wind up making those of us who want to be there feel like we’d rather leave in a hurry. The Tow report looks, in part, at the value of focusing more deeply on some of those others, the regulars who connected by geography or drawn by passion read digital news with the same kind of engagement as newspaper readers. Matt Shanahan of Scout Analytics divides users into fans (at least twice a week), regulars (weekly), occasionals (two or thre times a month) and fly-bys (monthly). At one 90,000-circ paper with a 450,000-montly-unique site, the fans and regulars totaled only seven percent, while fly-bys were more than 75 percent. But the fans, four percent of the audience, made up more than 55 percent of the traffic – and generated 50 times more than the average fly-by.
Shanahan argues that it’s time for publishers to realize the value isn’t in traffic; it’s in the engagement of core users. Instead of making money chasing traffics, they are giving up the ad revenue they could get by serving better contextual ads to users they “know.”
That’s one of the real opportunities for publishers now implementing or looking at meters, subscriptions and even micropay. The most loyal readers or the ones with the most self-interest will pay. The numbers will be small but probably consistent and relatively price elastic as long as they can afford it. Advertisers, in most cases, will pay more to reach them than the masses as long publishers can tell them who they’re reaching.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-time-to-look-for-readers-not-clicks