FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

This post is republished with permission and originally appears here.  

In paid content, one of the challenges for corporate sales is finding demand for content that can be monetized – finding a good lead. Our research shows one of the best sources for leads is within existing individual subscribers where several individuals are sharing the access to the paid content. The charts below show a typical example of how to identify an individual subscriber that is a lead for an up-sell to a corporate or group agreement.

The first chart shows the daily use profile for two different individual su More...

This post is republished with permission and originally appears here. 

Click-through rate (CTR) is often used to describe the advertising performance on a publisher's site. CTR for an ad is defined as the number of clicks on an ad divided by the number of times the ad is shown (impressions), expressed as a percentage. If the ad sales team for a publisher claims 1 million monthly unique visitors with 4 million page views and a CTR of 0.2% (or 8,000 click-throughs), the buyer might think those click-throughs are all distributed across the million unique users to yield 8,000 unique conversions. The buyer and the More...

Click-through rate or CTR is often used to describe the advertising performance on a publisher’s site. CTR for an ad is defined as the number of clicks on an ad divided by the number of times the ad is shown (impressions), expressed as a percentage. If the ad sales team for a publisher claims a million monthly unique visitors with 4 million page views and a CTR of 0.2% (or 8,000 click-throughs), the buyer might think those click-throughs are all distributed across the million unique users to yield 8,000 target audience members. The buyer and the seller are wrong.

Here’s the problem: CTR doesn’t take into account audience composition. To demonstrate the weakness of CTR to communicate performance, let’s assume a singl More...

This post is republished with permission and originally appears here.

...is a scraper! Or at least scrapers that aren't monetized properly. Scrapers are users or automated services that systematically consume media content - especially news. Their motivations are usually commercial in nature such as a media monitoring service, advertising verification, or lead sourcing. A scraper can be identified by the fact that their volume of consumption is several standard deviations or more higher compared to the rest of the audience - even compared to f More...

This post is run with permission and originally appears here. 

As I pointed out in my previous post, advertisers don't buy page views they buy audience. A publisher's business model has to produce and monetize an audience. So what kind of audience is profitable? A loyal one. Here is the proof...

The Revenue Model

Because audience engagement is the unit of monetization and because each member engages differently, the revenue contribution and profitability of each audience member varies. For example, assume a fly-by audience More...

This post is reprinted with permission and originally appears here.

Measuring the number of page views as a key performance indicator (KPI), is a growing practice among publishers. In fact, editorial and development teams are increasingly being rewarded for boosting page views, with some publishers even shaping their entire site just to generate page views.

That is not a business model! Let me prove it with an extreme example.

Any publisher can deploy bots to generate page views for their site. No advertiser will pay for those page views, because the page views have no advertising value. While page views could be used as a KPI by the editorial team to generate more c More...

This post is reprinted with permission and originally appears here.

In the pursuit of earnings, publishers have done two things - intensified SEO efforts, which creates fly-by ad revenue and established paywalls, which create fan subscription revenue.

Remember these definitions:

• Fly-by - Someone who visits once.
• Occasional - Visitor to the site two to three times per month.
• Regular - Visitor to the site one to two times per week.
• Fan - Visitor to the site more than two times per week.

Some fans are willing to subscribe through a paywall, and fly-bys are commodity impres More...