Measuring the news: what are the alternatives to pageviews?

journalims.co.uk reporting:
Pageviews often dominate the conversation in terms of measuring a website's performance, but is this the correct way to measure a news organisation's online success? And if no, what alternatives are there?

Speaking at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, these questions were posed by Pier Luca Santoro, a social media editor at La Stampa and founder of Data Hub, to a panel of experts on the issue of metrics....
Santoro suggested that, with the advent of social media, the amount of times a piece of content has been shared online could be both a quantitative and qualitative measurement of a piece of content's success.

"What makes that metric really interesting is that it's standardised," said Galant, "it's the same for any publication and it's public."

Pageviews are recorded internally and verified by independent organisations, while social shares are recorded by third parties and open for all to see.

"For the first time ever in the history of journalism we have a public, standardised metric," he said, but Haile questioned whether that truly solved the problem of measuring quality of content over a more quantitative value.

"The number of shares and the amount of attention do not sync up," he said, citing a recent Chartbeat study into audience habits on social media, that reported many people will share a story without reading it...
A more accurate metric in showing how engaged readers are in articles or other types of content may be time, suggested Haile, as it gauges the quality of content and therefore the success of a news organisation.

Advertisers have been buying on time for far longer than they have on anything elseTony Haile, Chartbeat

"The fact is advertisers have been buying on time for far longer than they have on anything else," he said, referring to television or radio advertising, and whether it's for two hours once a day or 20 seconds five times a day, time shows value because "you're competing against the entire sum of human endeavour" in gaining someone's attention.

"We've now established a common methodology," he said, "which is when you're actively attentive you're looking at the screen and doing something – scrolling, moving mouse or tapping," and Chartbeat have begun to measure the time readers spend on content as engagement....http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/measuring-the-news-what-are-the-alternatives-to-pageviews-/s2/a556640/

In defense of ‘vanity’ metrics: why page views are still important

Poynter reporting:
...
While it is critical that our industry evolves and adapts, and new ideas around better metrics are a key part of that journey, wishful thinking on new fangled metrics don’t necessarily mean we can simply abandon what works — and I dare say, works OK.
I am also keen on metrics that help drive conversions — and these will vary by newsroom and business model — of “guests” (your one-and-done type visitors) to “readers” (often registered but not paying) to “subscribers” (paying readers) to “members” (those who avail themselves of other non-content led benefits of subscribing.)
These metrics remain a work-in-progress in various News Corp newsrooms globally but, eventually, will be the primary focus of how we need to manage our newsrooms and news publishing companies when it comes to audience data. I am wary of “time spent” metrics simply because of the complexity of measuring that and the resulting assumptions and inaccuracies that usually creep in....
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/244136/in-defense-of-vanity-metrics-why-page-views-are-still-important/

Social or search...this obsession with traffic ignores the complexity of turning readers into revenue

theMediaBfiefing reporting:
Amid all the debate about whether or not social is overtaking search as the most important source of traffic for media brands, many have lost sight of a key issue: Search and social are two vital and often complementary methods of getting people to read content - but the way you monetise those people varies massively.
...

What's a reader worth, and why?

There are a number of questions a media brand should be asking about each person who visits its site, including:
-- Direct revenue: Will this person pay for my content?
-- Partner revenue: Will this person buy something else through me or one of my partners via my site?
-- Better targeting: Will this person give me more data to enhance my marketing efforts, or those of my clients?
-- More valuable target: Is this person, because they are more engaged, more valuable to my advertising clients?
There's a compelling argument that in answering many of these questions, media brands will start valuing social more. On Google, a media brand is just one purveyor of information among many. But with social media, be it Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or LinkedIn, there are more complex relationships between publisher and reader at play. ...
http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/no-social-traffic-hasn-t-overtaken-search-but-that-doesn-t-mean-it-isn-t-becoming-more-important

How digital weighs up against print for UK magazine circulations

journalism.co.uk reporting: The Audit Bureau for Circulation (ABC) has released the first ever combined print and digital figures for UK consumer magazines in 2013, based on the average number of sales for a digital edition of each issue.

The IPC Media title What's On TV ranked highest with a combined total circulation of 1,051,129, of which 1,571 were digital editions. Slimming World Magazine placed second with a combined circulation of 458,517 with 7,739 digital editions, while Glamour magazine placed third with a combined total of just over 415,000, supported by 4,778 digital editions.

In a press release accompanying the announcement, managing director of IPC advertising, Charlie Meredith, said: "We continue to expand and look for new ways to engage with our audiences and ensure that our brands are everywhere our consumers need and want them to be."

In terms of purely digital editions, ABC confirmed tech title T3 as the most widely read consumer magazine in terms of UK digital editions in 2013, with a reported figure of 22,319 average digital editions sold per issue, a year-on-year increase of exactly 100 per cent.

In previous reports, ABC had recorded the separate interactive editions and PDF 'page-turner' editions of each T3 issue under different metrics. This is the first report in which the figures have been combined.

The continental Europe edition of the Economist recorded the second highest number of digital edition sales, with just over 17,000, an increase of 47 percent from December 2012.
...The two titles to see the biggest year-on-year increase were motoring magazines from Haymarket Consumer Media.

Classic & Sports Car, which had seen its average digital sales drop to just 50 at the end of 2012, saw a year-on-year increase of over 2,000 per cent to 1,213.

Autosport, which had previously reported an average of only 134 digital sales per issue, recorded an average of 2,150 for 2013, an increase of 1,500 per cent.
http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/how-digital-weighs-up-against-print-for-uk-magazine-circulations/s2/a555858/

Why It's So Hard to Measure Online Readership

The Atlantic reporting:

Name a metric, any metric, for measuring audience attention, and there is (a) a reason why it's useful; (b) a reason why it's worthless; and (c) a way for digital media companies to corrupt it.

Page views (e.g.: clicks) used to be the most common currency of online attention, only to be replaced by unique visitors (e.g.: readers). But in the viral age, "readers" doesn't mean what it used to mean. If you were a newspaper in the 1980s, readers = subscribers who receive your bundle of paper each morning. In a bookmarked-site world, readers meant Web visitors who drop by a few days a month at most. But in the viral age, readers can mean 1 million Facebook users who see some sensational headline, clicked it, and scurried away, having no recollection of what URL hosted the article, and never visit the site again.

Reader used to be a person. Now it's a spectrum. There are dedicated readers on one end, Tsetse-fly-brained Facebook browsers on the other, and fully engaged one-time readers in the middle. Surely they shouldn't count equally to an advertiser seeking an consistently engaged and knowable audience.

That's why some digital companies are trying to the Internet less like a newspaper and more like TV. YouTube now measures “Time Watched." Medium counts “Total Time Reading." Chartbeat tracks “Average Engaged Time.” And now Upworthy—the viral firehose of the Web—announced that it's developed a new metric. "Attention minutes" seeks to measure time spent watching or reading an Upworthy page, by studying "length of time a browser tab has been open, how long a video player has been running, and the movement of the mouse on screen," according to Nieman Lab.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/why-its-so-hard-to-measure-online-readership/283658/?utm_source=API%27s+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-9ea68ad783-31701933 

A New Model For Digital Publishing: The Affinity Engagement Index

fastcolabs reporting:
The audience in digital media such as the web is measurable and can be analyzed far beyond the means of traditional media. It is this aspect that should be emphasized when constructing revenue models for content businesses. Instead of the old commodity model in which one audience member is as valuable as the next, the Affinity Engagement Index (AEI) model proposes to specifically show how valuable an audience segment is to an advertiser, in a way that can form the basis for a negotiation (much in the way that CPMs work now).
The model is based on two critical factors:

Affinity

Affinity, for the purposes of this model, is a measurement of how much the audience likes the publisher’s content. While affinity can be measured on the basis of an individual for a specific content item, for AEI purposes, we look at audience segment affinity for “clusters” of content, which are organized together by common metadata (such as author, category, topics, etc.).

Engagement

Engagement is the level of an audience member’s interaction with, and attention to, a publisher. A high-engagement audience member is more valuable than a low engagement audience member, because they are paying more attention.
The model would create scores for each factor through various methods:

Potential

Potential represents the value of an audience segment. Pricing for advertising should be compared against the Potential number (it is the equivalent of CPMs):

Segmentation

While you could describe a complete aggregate audience for a publisher in terms of their AEI score, it’s likely that a publisher will want to segment their audience, both by gross divisions in affinity clusters (this portion of the audience is into web development, this portion is into typography etc.), but also by engagement levels....
http://www.fastcolabs.com/3025607/a-new-model-for-digital-publishing-the-affinity-engagement-index?utm_source=API%27s+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_campaign=22a808c1ea-Need_to_Know_January_29_20141_29_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-22a808c1ea-31701933

Tomorrow’s metric for news is action

Nieman Journalism Lab reporting:

The tools we use to measure the value of our journalism seem to fail us: Metrics don’t match our lofty objectives, or their innate inflexibility forces us to chase the wrong goals. They’ve proven especially vexing in the digital era, with so many available and wide disagreement over which ones ought to matter. On both the editorial and business sides of what we do, the measurements we’re using consistently seem behind the times.
But metrics are important, because what we measure, we tend to become. Chasing ratings tilts TV news toward celebretainment. Chasing pageviews leads to annoying slideshow page reloads.
This year, the problematic pageview seemed to give way to “social lift” or some measure of sharing reach.
And time on site or time reading became key proxies for the “engagement” we all seek. The innovative platform (and aggregator) Medium considers time reading its key metric. And the squishydefinition of “quality” for Facebook includes “something that leads you to stay away from Facebook for awhile.”
By next year, I expect someone will crack the code of how to measure something more sophisticated: journalism’s influence, be it in civic action or cultural outcomes. Today’s metric may be time, but tomorrow’s is action.
This isn’t a new issue. Public media held “impact summits” nearly four years ago identifying the five elements we need in order to measure journalism’simpact. These days, ProPublica diligently tracks reactions to its work — their
investigations follow the impact of their revelations. The Solutions Journalism Network identifies solutions or actions by design. And the Knight-MozillaFellowship at The New York Times is crafted specifically around figuring out how
we measure the results of our work in the civic sphere. So getting to a more sophisticated metric is work that’s already well under way. 2014 could be the year we figure it out.
We’ve arrived at a choice cultural moment for an action or “impact” measurement. We have smaller, more fractured communities, highly decentralized civic involvement, and ever-personalized media. Since the link between journalism and civic action often reveals itself most clearly at the local level, the circumstances are right for a new way to measure it.
First, the community situation. On my beat, the one clear theme that’s emerged is how often connections in the cloud have fed the formation of tighter and more specific offline communities. Tomorrow’s hot communities are as narrow as “the people of Powder Mountain, Utah,” a group that came together to purchase a single mountain for the purpose of creating place around a sharedethos. Or “the people who live in one house in San Francisco” — a community of like-minded millennials who came together to build community in a house bysharing food, cars, and ideas. Local communities are becoming smaller subsets as software reorganizes the world. 
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/12/tomorrows-metric-for-news-is-action/ 

Rethinking how you utilize social media metrics in practice

Knight Digital Media Center reporting:
Social media metrics can help you tell whether your engagement efforts are gaining any traction in your community. But how can you know what this data is really telling you, and how can social media metrics support sound strategic decisions?
A recent article by Nancy K. Baym in the peer-reviewed online journal First Monday, “Data not seen: The uses and shortcomings of social media metrics,” explores how to make sense of the numbers.

1. Not all followers are equally valuable. A musician said in interview that he has had supporters with millions of followers recommend him on Twitter from their accounts, resulting in 70 clicks through to his website. Other advocates, with only 2,000 followers, prompted 300 click-throughs following their endorsement. This means that attention is the “currency,” not how many people you’re distributing information to. It is important to push content toward those who personally identify with your message or brand—this will drive more engagement in the long run.
2. Audience size may be misleading. The prevalence of “dead followers” (i.e., inactive users attached to profile) and idle followers has been revealed in recent months, prompting a discussion about how effective quantifying the audience is in determining reach. Followers who actively share media are many times more valuable than those who are passive, content with the one-way street. Gauging the active:inactive followers ratio and manipulating it to score the most engaging users possible helps improve one’s outreach exponentially. One way of accomplishing this is to personally reach out to active users on the site, starting a dialogue that results in them lending support to your brand.
3. Tailor messaging to attract influential users...
4. http://www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org/news/2013/11/rethinking-how-you-utilize-social-media-metrics-practice 

To Save Journalism, News Needs to Buy Into Data

Digiday reporting:
Smart news organizations will move from a “tracking” mentality that simply lists what audiences are doing to focus on what any such insight could mean for both journalism and the business of journalism. Newsrooms need to embrace the kind of number-crunching more common to marketers.
That means a focus on conversion: how to turn browsers and readers into loyal customers, and using data to uncover tactics that help surface better news recommendations. It means embracing real-time analytics, sometimes starting off with expensive third-party analytics providers but, increasingly, through homegrown tools, which are vital for newsroom decision-makers to try and constantly fine-tune digital offerings.
The challenge in most established newsrooms remains the ability — and willingness — of journalists and editors to pay attention to data and to actually want to act on it without reflexively falling back on age-old and often mistaken notions that actually responding to reader-behavior is nothing but pandering. Talking about data in the morning news meeting is a great start but quick actions have to follow the rhetoric throughout the day.
I also worry about a growing movement to throw out or disdain valuable metrics simply because a vocal minority believes they are irrelevant.
http://digiday.com/publishers/data-save-journalism/

The Year of Mobile…Measurement

ClickZ reporting:
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence has gotten an early start thinking about plans and priorities for 2013. Our most recent mobile board of directors meeting last week in San Francisco included some brainstorming about big issues in Q4 2012 and into the new year.
There is still a lot to do across the board to help mobile live up to its potential as a medium for advertising and marketing. But one set of topics on the list does seem to increasingly be the priority for our members, and therefore us as well. At the risk of being premature, I will tip the IAB's hand and say that for us, 2013 will be the year of mobile measurement.
In the world of media, when we talk about "measurement" we really mean three different, but often overlapping things:

• Planning. The metrics that help an advertiser decide where to place their ads to best reach an intended audience.
• Currency. The metrics that determine how much the advertiser actually writes the check for.
• Effectiveness. The metrics that prove whether an ad campaign had its intended impact on consumers' psyches or purchasing behaviors.

In the traditional media world, the planning and currency metrics are typically the same: for example, Nielsen ratings play both roles for television. In the digital world, the three kinds of metrics have generally come from distinct sources, and interaction (also known as "engagement") metrics are an increasingly important type of effectiveness measure. All three types of metrics exist for mobile, but mobile buyers and sellers need to improve, harmonize, and potentially standardize all of them.
http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2220087/the-year-of-mobile-measurement?utm_source=Daily+Buzz+from+eMedia+Vitals&utm_campaign=a3015189d1-nl_DB_10_30_2012&utm_medium=email

Measure reach and frequency, not clicks’ – Facebook

 research reporting:

US— Facebook’s head of measurement and insights Brad Smallwood has urged marketers to stop looking at click-through rates (CTR) to measure advertising success and look instead at reach and frequency.

Speaking at the IAB MIXX conference in New York, Smallwood said that advertisers understand that reach, frequency and audience insights can lead to sales, but are too reliant on clicks to evaluate the success of online activity.
“Marketers have demanded metrics and we turned to clicks for a long time to offer this. The click model works well for monitoring direct response, but this is inefficient for categories that are not consumable. The onus is on us to find the right metric for you in this case, so we have been looking at what we can do better and how we can help.”
Smallwood told the audience that its recent partnership with Datalogix has been key to the company identifying new needs for brands who want to understand the return they get for their Facebook investment. The two companies undertook a study of 50 digital campaigns using a new tool that compares ad exposure on Facebook with in-store purchases.
“For us, this is a turning point. We’ve been flying blind and metrics haven’t moved from being focused on CTR as a result. Our study with Datalogix has shown us that this isn’t what we should be focusing on. Clicks are great, but it’s impressions that create value. In 99% of the campaigns we evaluated, sales generated from online branding ad campaigns were from people that saw, but did not interact with, ads. Just like TV advertising, it is reach that drives revenue for online brand marketers.”
To support his argument, Smallwood cited research from Nielsen that showed a 0.07% correlation between high click-through rates and actual sales compared to the Datalogix figures on impressions. He said that the Datalogix study found that campaigns that maximised reach had a 70% higher return on investment and by reallocating high-frequency impressions to people seeing too few impressions, you could see a 40% increase in ROI with the same budget. (Facebook has posted a blog with more on this study here).
http://www.research-live.com/4008364.article

'The Economist' Sets Digital Rate Base Claims a first in magazine world

Adweek reporting:

Print media buyers have been pushing publishers to give up more information about their digital editions as they try to assess a new medium. Now, The Economist is delivering on one of those buyer demands by being, it claims, the first to set a digital rate base.

The rate base of 50,000 is intended, like a print base, to increase advertisers’ confidence. It will take effect in January and appear on the newsweekly’s Consolidated Media Report, a year-old reporting tool from the Audit Bureau of Circulations that attempts to present a brand’s total footprint across print and digital platforms. (The ABC’s longstanding publisher’s statements don’t yet

have a place for digital-only rate base claims.)

“We realized that transparency is important,” said David Kaye, vp of ad sales for The Economist, which planned to announce the rate base news on Sept. 25. “The agency community is asking for this.”

The Economist has well-established digital bona fides. In April, it reported having 48,000 digital subscriptions, or about 6 percent of its total circulation, which is on the high end for magazines. Since then, the magazine’s digital circulation has topped 50,000, Kaye said.

The new rate base will apply to the North American non-replica, subscription sales of The Economist that are read on the iPad, iPhone, Android devices and BlackBerry Playbook. It does not include single-copy sales, nor does it include Zinio, Nook and Kindle Fire versions, which are replica editions.

Having separate rate bases for print and digital is just what some media buyers want. They don’t want to be charged for digital copies they’re not buying, and they object to the practice by some publishers of folding digital circulation into print circ in order to make their print circulation guarantee.

“I get why they’re doing that; they’re trying to sell one circulation,” said Barry Lowenthal, president of The Media Kitchen. “But advertisers want to buy one channel’s audience.”

http://www.adweek.com/news/press/economist-sets-digital-rate-base-143969?utm_source=Daily+Buzz+from+eMedia+Vitals&utm_campaign=3cd5e76be9-nl_DB_09_26_2012&utm_medium=email 

Marketers Find Less than Half of Analytics Useful for Decision-Making

eMarketer reporting: 

The amount of data at marketers’ disposal is only growing, and in the case of some forward-thinking companies the results of the “Big Data” explosion are already being felt. But for most marketers, web analytics data is still too much, with too little context.
According to research from Econsultancy and web analytics consultancy Lynchpin, a majority of marketers worldwide say that less than half of all the analytics data they collect is actually useful for decision-making. Just one in 10 companies thought a strong majority of analytics data was helpful, and less than a third said somewhere between half and three-quarters of all data was useful.

In many cases, web analytics are still not tied to a broader business strategy—and some companies reported not even having such a strategy. In addition to the 14% in that situation, 34% said analytics were not integrated at all with their business plans. The most common integration strategy was for companies to share key performance indicators across data from the web and elsewhere.

Read more at http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1009245&ecid=a6506033675d47f881651943c21c5ed4#MRW39pqKdOKAsZzg.99

Why research has to change to be of real use to the creative industry

research. reporting:
On the final day of Cannes there was an inspirational speech from two creative heavyweights, Sir John Hegarty of BBH and Dan Wieden of Wieden & Kennedy.
The speech was a whistle-stop tour of some of their best campaigns from the last 30 years, including work for Levi’s, Xbox, Nike and Old Spice, to name a few.
Wieden went on to present his recent Old Spice campaign paying particular attention to the bit where the hero character reacts directly to messages via social media and creates personalised video responses. Hegarty stated that this was exactly the type of freedom that creatives need in their work: the ability to react without having to research their ideas.
It is clear that research – or “f*****g research” as it was referred to more than once on stage – is still perceived as the enemy of the creative industry...
...During his speech Wieden showcased his new campaign for P&G to run during the Olympics, which celebrates the role of mums. It is well worth a look as it’s a highly emotive piece of creative that actually resulted in widespread, instantaneous applause around the auditorium. The ad shows the journey that mums go on with their children and depicts those special moments in their development, culminating in grown-up sons and daughters winning gold at the Olympics with proud mums looking on.
...How could research have played a role in the development of this campaign? We could, for example, have challenged mums to recount the real-life stories of the pivotal moments in the development of their children. I would argue that this would best be done within a community environment, where the debate could evolve over time to find the most emotive scenarios. With relevance and authenticity so high on the agenda, this type of approach could add significantly to the impact of the creative.
...So rather than move straight into testing we can instead develop ‘creative experiments’ – ways to expose consumers to very early creative ideas. We can see how engaged they are with concepts based on the amount of additional content they create. We can see how they interact with ideas rather than just ask them questions. This allows us to provide insight at the earliest stages of development, which is where it is often most valuable.

Your E-Book Is Reading You

WSJ reporting:
It takes the average reader just seven hours to read the final book in Suzanne Collins's "Hunger Games" trilogy on the Kobo e-reader—about 57 pages an hour. Nearly 18,000 Kindle readers have highlighted the same line from the second book in the series: "Because sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them." And on Barnes & Noble's Nook, the first thing that most readers do upon finishing the first "Hunger Games" book is to download the next one.

For centuries, reading has largely been a solitary and private act, an intimate exchange between the reader and the words on the page. But the rise of digital books has prompted a profound shift in the way we read, transforming the activity into something measurable and quasi-public. Eben Shapiro explains on Lunch Break. Photo: AP.

For centuries, reading has largely been a solitary and private act, an intimate exchange between the reader and the words on the page. But the rise of digital books has prompted a profound shift in the way we read, transforming the activity into something measurable and quasi-public.
The major new players in e-book publishing—Amazon, Apple and Google—can easily track how far readers are getting in books, how long they spend reading them and which search terms they use to find books. Book apps for tablets like the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and how much time they spend reading. Retailers and some publishers are beginning to sift through the data, gaining unprecedented insight into how people engage with books.
....Barnes & Noble, which accounts for 25% to 30% of the e-book market through its Nook e-reader, has recently started studying customers' digital reading behavior. Data collected from Nooks reveals, for example, how far readers get in particular books, how quickly they read and how readers of particular genres engage with books. Jim Hilt, the company's vice president of e-books, says the company is starting to share their insights with publishers to help them create books that better hold people's attention.
The stakes are high for the company as it seeks a greater share of the e-book market. Sales of Nook devices rose 45% this past fiscal year, and e-book sales for the Nook rose 119%. Overall, Nook devices and e-books generated $1.3 billion, compared to $880 million the previous year. Microsoft recently invested $300 mihttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304870304577490950051438304.htmlllion for a 17.6% stake of the Nook.

Nielsen Unveiling Suite Of Next-Generation TV Meters: Designed To Enhance Compliance, Cross-Platform Measurement

Mediapost reporting:
In what is likely the most significant change in the methods Nielsen uses to measure TV -- and potentially all forms of video content -- the ratings company this week quietly began informing clients of a major initiative to develop a suite of new audience meters and digital tracking codes that could begin replacing its current meters as soon as 2014.
Dubbed “GTAM,” which stands for Global Television Audience Metering, the initiative includes the development of four new audience metering technologies designed to deal with all of the conceivable challenges involved in measuring the viewing behavior of contemporary consumer households.
The initiative is significant for several reasons beyond the technologies being developed, including the fact that it is a major reaffirmation of Nielsen’s strategy for basing audience measurement around in-home viewing, which has been the foundation of its audience measurement systems, although some components of the GTAM initiative will make it easier for Nielsen to incorporate mobile, wireless and Internet-based video audience exposure as well. The other major reason the plan is significant is that as its name might imply, it will be a global effort -- and the technologies being developed would likely be deployed as part of a standardized methodology across the 16 international markets Nielsen currently measures media audiences in.
The four new metering solutions include the so-called “GTAM meter,” which will be the primary device Nielsen plans to use for audience measurement. The GTAM meter is said to be smaller, more ergonometric, easier for consumers to interact with, and far less “invasive” than Nielsen’s current industry standard “A/P meters.” Like the A/P meters, which stand for active/passive metering components, the new GTAM meter is expected to utilize a combination of active and passive measurement technologies, but unlike Nielsen’s current meters it will not require it to be physically connected to any household media devices, such as a TV set, set-top tuner, DVR, etc., to function.
The second technology in development is a lighter, somewhat less sophisticated meter, aptly named the “GTAM Lite Meter,”.....
Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/174443/nielsen-unveiling-suite-of-next-generation-tv-mete.html?edition=46732#ixzz1uf1KGCgs

Customer-driven from the inside out

emedia/vitals reporting:
Media companies seeking to become more "customer driven" are adopting practices commonly used by consumer marketers, such as loyalty marketing or behavioral targeting. As publishers invest in these efforts, many are running into a barrier that most marketers can relate to: an unclear or incomplete view of who their customers actually are.
...UBM TechWeb, publisher of technology brands such as InformationWeek, BYTE, Dr Dobb's and BlackHat, has addressed this challenge from the inside out, building a consolidated customer database that serves as the core of the company's multi-channel marketing approach, which it has dubbed "Curvonomics."
Curvonomics is TechWeb's way of measuring the value of its audience of IT professionals based on the content they consume. As a visitor digs more deeply into TechWeb content - viewing a page, downloading a white paper, attending a webinar or a live event - his or her value increases. The more TechWeb learns about each visitor's engagement and activities, the better they can serve them, in order to increase their value further.
The "curve" represents a customer's economic progression from low-CPM display advertising to high-end paid conferences, said Scott Vaughan, UBM TechWeb's chief marketing officer. "A visitor can come in at any point on the curve, and we assign a value to each of those engagements," he said. "The goal is to logically move the buyer up or down the curve, with a focus on ARPU [average revenue per user}. And the data tells us where to take them." 
24 databases into 1
Ah, the data. That brings us back to the consolidated database. Five years ago, UBM TechWeb had 24 databases storing various types of audience information across multiple brands. Now, it has one primary customer database.
It's not quite a 360-degree view of the customer - but it's getting there. UBM TechWeb has increased ARPU by 5 percent, and the number of active registered users (defined as users who have engaged over the last 12 months) has grown by 19 percent. Audience revenue now accounts for 45 percent of the company's total revenues, with marketing services (including advertising) accounting for the rest. 
4 areas of focus

MAGAZINE INDUSTRY DEVELOPS SET OF VOLUNTARY GUIDELINES TO DRIVE GROWTH OF ADVERTISING ON TABLETS

mpa reporting:
The MPA, working with a coalition of senior magazine executives from throughout the industry, has developed a common set of definitions, a consistent position on timing for data release, and guidelines around tablet metrics, it was announced today by Nina Link, President and CEO, MPA, the Association of Magazine Media. These voluntary guidelines are intended to provide enhanced understanding and clarity about the measurement of magazine media audiences on tablets for the advertising community.

“The tablet guidelines have been created to recognize the need within the advertising community for greater insight and understanding into how to best leverage this powerful new platform,” said Link.  “Tablets are one of the fastest-growing consumer electronic devices in history.  They are ideally suited to leverage the incredible strengths of magazine media content. Tablets create a highly immersive experience for readers; a dynamic, new environment for advertisers to connect with magazine audiences; and almost unlimited opportunity for our brands.”  

The recommended guidelines are the first deliverables developed by the MPA Tablet Metrics Task Force, a group of magazine executives charged with the creation of guidelines and metrics for tablets. The group has been meeting since the last quarter of 2011.  The Task Force consists of representatives from seven magazine media publishers:  Bonnier Corporation, Condé Nast, Forbes, Hearst Magazines, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Meredith Corporation and Time Inc.  Seven advertising agencies were consulted about the guidelines as well as the MPA Executive Committee.
http://www.magazine.org/association/press/mpa_press_releases/tablet-metrix.aspx

Ad Buyers Ask Magazines to Reveal More About Their Tablet Editions

AdAge reporting:
"While certain digital extensions, such as the tablet, represent a relatively new medium, we believe the time has come for rigorous transparency and accountability," the 4A's Print Media Committee said in a May 1 letter to the MPA, the magazine industry association.
When the MPA recommended a set of tablet metrics to members in April, it suggested publishers regularly tell advertisers how many tablet editions were paid for by consumers, how many tablet editions were actually opened, the number of reader sessions per issue and the time spent per reader per issue.
But ad buyers on the 4A's Print Media Committee say they need more.
"We think there is valuable insight that can be gleaned by breaking out tablet-audience metrics by subscription and single-copy sales," said their letter, which was signed by George Janson, managing partner and director of print at Group M as well as chair of the 4A's Print Media Committee.
Among their other requests, buyers said they want information on consumer engagement with ads customized for tablet editions and separate paid circulation guarantees for print and digital circulation.
Buyers also want to see subscriber data separated into readers who get tablet access as part of their print subscription and readers who buy tablet-only subscriptions directly...
http://adage.com/article/mediaworks/ad-buyers-info-magazine-tablet-editions/234547/?utm_source=Daily+Buzz&utm_campaign=2967708190-_nb_DB_05-04-2012&utm_medium=email

Magazines slow to adopt new reporting format

adweek reporting:

As the number of digital reading devices has grown, publishers have evolved to keep up. So, too, have the firms that audit them. Last year, with ad buyers clamoring for more information about print audiences, the Audit Bureau of Circulations launched a voluntary product called the Consolidated Media Report that presents publications’ total brand footprint across print and digital platforms.

So far, 30 or so newspapers have released Consolidated Media Reports. Magazines have been slow to follow suit, but they’re starting to. On April 30, The Economist will release a CMR, the second major title to do so. (Popular Science released the first one last fall and parent Bonnier Corp. is getting ready to release reports for three more titles, Field & Stream, Outdoor Life and Popular Photography.)

The Economist has had a good print and digital story to tell, so it’s not totally surprising that it’s one of the first to adopt this new reporting format. It’s bucked the downward circulation trend, despite its high price. (An annual print subscription averages $105.) And unlike most magazines, it doesn’t give away its print content online.

In addition to the print circulation stats that are in every magazine’s ABC Publisher’s Statement, The Economist’s CMR reveals that its digital edition averaged about 48,000 in sales for March—about 6 percent of total circulation, putting it at the high end of magazines. There were 255,000 readers. At $105 for an annual subscription, the digital edition commands a premium as the print does...

http://www.adweek.com/news/press/economist-reveals-digital-circ-139933