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Does Glenn Hansen have a death wish?

In a recent article in Media Business magazine, Glenn Hansen, president and CEO of BPA (the dominant auditor of controlled circulation media) said this about his organization’s website auditing service:

“Our numbers are going to be lower than any other numbers that you get from any other source, whether Google or any commercial Web-analytics company.”

Add some coal-tar?

It’s impossible to tell from the article, but I infer that he was proud of this.

Several years ago – the last time I seriously looked into auditing websites – my research told me that I could expect a 50% drop in reportable traffic by doing a BPA web audit. At the time, my company was using an analytics tool that, when implemented, had already cut traffic 33% by weeding out search engine spiders.

In the end, I didn’t need the BPA audit, and I sold around the numbers delivered by our analytics system by focusing on products that gave customers what they were asking for: guaranteed impressions, delivery of clickthroughs, and various levels of leads. When we did these things, the prospects didn’t worry if we had the largest or busiest website.

I’ve previously written about BPA’s lack of contact with the reality of its members; and about why audited circulations continue to shrink.

It’s natural that BPA, like any auditor, would seek to extend its product line by pushing website audits. But boasting about the great difference between BPA’s traffic measurement and those of other analytic systems demonstrates that BPA is as far away as ever from understanding the grim future that it faces.

The problem BPA members are having is that an audit – whether it’s for a print product or a website – addresses advertiser questions that are now obsolete. Not all advertisers have figured this out yet, but the number that has is growing. A recession hastens the education process, as marketers are forced to coax more measurable impact out of a reduced spend.

An audit is testimony to the nature of a media outlet’s audience: it’s size, the sources from which it was recruited, and any additional information that members of the audience themselves volunteer to offer.

That’s not what advertisers want – or ever really wanted. What they really want is a measured response to their marketing activities. The audit always fell short of that goal. Whether any of us knew it, the circulation audit was just a long-term stop-gap – an alternative set of metrics until technology created a way for the desired metrics to be used.

Today that technology exists. It’s called the Internet, and advertisers (if you haven’t heard) are swarming to it.

BPA hopes to secure some kind of future for itself by pushing website audit services. But those services aren’t necessary, because advertisers can get all the measurement they want with intelligent programs that generate clickthroughs and other direct responses. And unlike audits, which provide a snapshot that is 6 to 12 months old, clickthroughs and leads arrive in real time. Within 30 days, an average marketer can tell if he or she is getting an adequate return from a specific program.

Worse, not only is BPA measuring the wrong stuff in its website audits, it’s bragging that the numbers members will be compelled to report are well below the numbers that non-members get to use.

To summarize: It provides undesirable information that people don’t need. I can’t help comparing it to Burger King putting a dollop of coal-tar on it’s bacon triple cheeseburger.

If there is ROI in this for the publisher, will somebody please help me understand?

I don’t know why anyone bothers with a BPA website audit; if I were a buyer, it would be an immediate sign to me that the website’s owners are slow to understand or respond to the customers’ changing needs. The best thing a BPA web audit could tell me is to look elsewhere.

More on AOL: It’s new content strategy is dead wrong

A week ago, I wrote about the futility of AOL’s rebranding unless it figures out how to become more relevant to its audience.

This week I have to write about the futility of AOL’s effort to become more relevant to its audience.

The centerpiece of that effort, according to PaidContent.org, is a three-pronged approach to generating new content:

Hire lots of journalists. It’s good news that AOL is trying to generate original content, and I’m pleased that it’s using trained content professionals – of which there are plenty available. It has a staff of 3,000 journalists, according to PaidContent, which puts it into the top tier of U.S. news-gathering organizations.
2.

Use algorithms to predict what stories people want to read, and then assign these to the journalists. The objective is clear. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong hopes that by giving people content they want, AOL will become the content place to go.

He’s wrong. This is the kind of thinking that puts Jon and Kate Gosselin in our faces day after day, week after week, month after tawdry month. It takes variety out of the news cycle, just as Wal-Mart’s unceasing desire to stock only the best-selling SKUs limits the variety of what you can buy at the world’s largest retailer.

When someone says, “I want more stories like the one about Jon and Kate,” they aren’t really saying they want to hear more about the Gosselin family. They’re saying they want information that makes them feel the same way they did when they heard it (for better or worse), and that makes them feel as informed as they did when they talked about it at work the next day.

People can tell you what was important to them yesterday, but they don’t know what’s going to be important to them tomorrow. Media have not succeeded until now, nor will they in the future, by giving people what they want so much as by giving people what’s new, important and interesting.

The real function AOL’s journalists could serve is to present information that is new, important and interesting. AOL has hired the journalists but it’s about to screw up in deploying them.

Get advertisers more involved with content. This isn’t unique and it isn’t new. It’s just one more effort to help marketers bludgeon their target audiences into submission. Hey, I’m a marketer and I still can’t stand the thought of this. Everybody on one side of the equation is doing this, and everybody on the other side of the equation is trying to tune it out. Creating more and more advertorial microsites – no matter how well intentioned some of them will inevitably be – is not the big-internet business model of the future.

In fact, this is the very reason why social media is so hot right now: because social media lets users find the information they want. AOL’s model is to deliver the information, fire-hose style, right down the user’s gullet. It may generate some short-term revenue, but it won’t make AOL relevant or desirable.

It will do the opposite.

None of this is to say that AOL’s plan is evil or particularly dreadful. I think it’s pretty typical. But that’s why it won’t work. AOL is trying to distinguish itself by doing what every other large media company is trying to do. For a company in trouble, that’s a formula for failure.

What is the world’s smallest deck chair?

It’s the period in Aol. As in, America Online’s new branding effort, which changes the company from AOL to Aol. – but doesn’t make it any more relevant in a post-internet-service-provider world.

Seriously, this isn’t like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic; as AOL and Time Warner complete their de-merger, it’s like replacing the rubber pad on a leg of a deck chair so it doesn’t scuff the deck.

I don’t understand why Aol. even exists anymore, except that it’s too big to go away quietly. The services it provided in the early days of the Internet – everything under one roof like a well-lit mall in an otherwise under-developed part of town – have all been superseded by a wider variety of offerings on the well-developed ‘Net.

Its search engine has dropped out of the top tier and offers no unique user value that would separate it from any others.

And I’m always startled when I find myself exchanging e-mails with someone who still has an address at the aol.com domain. Actually, it’s not an exchange; any e-mail I’ve sent in the last few months to the few Aol.-users I know has bounced back to me. Just this morning, I printed out a document and put it in an envelope with a stamp, because the Aol. user’s address rejected the attachment.

Yes, Aol. has a brand problem. If you’re an investor who bet your retirement on AOL-Time Warner, the brand represents broken promises and unfulfilled dreams. For pretty much everyone else it represents obsolescence.

That’s obviously not what the folks at Aol. and its branding agency, Wolff Olins (of the Omnicom Group) are thinking.

In its coverage (linked above), The New York Times quotes Sam Wilson, managing director in the New York of Wolff Olins, the branding agency Aol. has hired. The Times writes:

The period in the logo was added to suggest “confidence, completeness,” Ms. Wilson said, by declaring that “AOL is the place to go for the best content online, period.”

The article also quotes Aol.’s CEO (or is that Ceo.?) Tim Armstrong:

Mr. Armstrong said he liked to describe the period as “the AOL dot” because “the dot is the pivot point for what comes after AOL,” whether it is e-mail, Web sites or coming offerings that will “surprise people.”

What will surprise me is if Aol. can provide the Internet community with a reason to exist other than its legacy – something about which the online world is notoriously indifferent. To me, the dot looks a lot like the head of a nail, a coffin nail maybe – which might be enough to keep the deck chairs from sliding around as the ship continues to list.

News: Not dead, but being reborn

This article, on the effort by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar to start a local news service in Honolulu, validates my postion that journalism and the news business are not dead or dying. They are being taken up by a new generation of media outsiders – people who value news and aren’t so burdened by years of “training” in the industry, that they can see new possibilities that may exist. It also helps that they aren’t burdened by an infrastructure built over decades to support old business models.

The article doesn’t say much about Omidyar’s business model – but he intends the service to be for-profit and to generate new contet.

A couple things about this jump out at me – in addition to the obvious fact that it’s at least one more person who’s not willing to give up on the news.

New news businesses tend to be local – where there is less competition to provide information, and where the advertising crisis has had the least impact.
The goals of new news businesses are modest; the ones I’m hearing about tend to seek primacy in a small area, to have a good impact on a relatively small number of people, and make a little money in the process.

Which strikes me as a pretty good way to rebuild an industry that is in historic transition.

Years from now, there will be big players again, who have figured out how to consolidate the many small for-profit news operations that are popping up. Some of those big players will be the same names that are familiar in media circles today. Others will be new.

And the news business will look very different from the way it does right now.

But it will be a business and an industry.

Somehow.

The startling drop in audited circulation

According to AudienceDevelopment.com, audited circulation levels are declining at historic rates.

This actually points to two trends — one economics related, and one customer-induced.

The first is that publishers are cutting circulation in order to reduce cost. AD states that “183 publications decreased circ 5 percent or more compared to 142 a year ago and 101 the year previous. Conversely only 41 publications increased circ five percent or more compared to 76 the year previous.”

OK, so publishers are cutting circulation to reduce printing and postage costs. It happens in every recession, and it won’t come back much, if at all, following this recession because advertisers won’t accept rate hikes in exchange for a larger rate base. There’s simply no money in sending more publications to more people.

But the second trend is bigger and more meaningful to advertisers and publishers – and it could put the auditors out of business. That is that publishers are dropping their audits altogether because the audit process provides decreasing ROI.

AD states: “Departing titles far exceed newly audited titles. A record 69 titles were discontinued or ceased being audited and only 23 titles were added to the audited ranks. The total number of audited “consumer magazines” fell from 545 a year ago to 499.”

More and more advertisers are changing their perspective from wanting to reach a verified audience to wanting to achieve a measurable response from whoever they reach – a painfully fundamental change that I’ve previously addressed, and which most publishers – especially in the glamorous consumer world – are still trying to tiptoe around.
A hundred valid responses from an unaudited audience is worth 10x more than 10 valid responses from an audited audience.
From a publisher’s perspective, if you can deliver the responses, the audit becomes irrelevant.

Based on this, the audit bureaus ought to be frightened.

And while abandoning your audit is still a bold step in the magazine business, I assume that most publishers who do so are reinvesting in products that deliver the kind of results their customers really want.

The parties I’m most concerned about are the publishers who haven’t talked about leaving the audit behind. Because if it hasn’t occurred to you, then you clearly haven’t been listening to what your customers want. And this is one of those watershed times when the only security is to be so close to your customers that you can feel them breathe.

All the news that’s fit to buy

The New York Times, according to one of its own, is close to deciding whether to try charging for online content. If you assume that the best way to bolster the future of news is to figure out how to get people to pay for it online, then this is important – and a good thing if The Times does, in fact, try charging for content.

The only way to get people to start paying for content is for a few leaders to simply take the leap and start charging. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. is implementing a plan to do so. Having The Times follow would only be good for the movement.

Can it work? That’s the big debate in media. Many think content wants to be free. Others, like myself, think consumers want it to be free primarily because they’ve been trained that content comes cheap. What nobody knows is how much people will actually pay, or whom they would pay, for real journalism.

If the news is to find its footing again – that is, if anyone is ever going to figure out a 21st Century business model by which journalism can flourish – the starting point is knowledge of the true value that journalism has to its end users. This is something that’s been obscured for the past 150 years.

Will consumers place enough value on it that they are willing to pay the full, unsubsidized cost of sending investigative reporters to do what they do (and defending against the inevitable lawsuits that are a byproduct of their work)? It would be nice. It would simplify the quandary of media executives, who are now gathering in solemn charrettes in search of a bew design for profitable media.

But the truth is that nobody knows. We don’t know what a newspaper would actually cost if paid for fully by readers? Or how its mission, staffing levels, range of focus and intensity of reporting might be adjusted over time to reflect the market-based measure of its value. How would it be distributed? How often would it be published? Who would its readers be?

None of these questions can be answered until enough media simply jump in and try to find out. Until now, few (the Wall Street Journal being the only one of any critical mass that I can come up with) have taken that risk. If The New York Times is getting ready to give it a try, desperation in the business may be reaching some kind of tipping point.

I’m fully confident that real journalism has a significant societal value. The problem is that it’s always been paid for indirectly. Once that value is untethered from the indirect means by which media have always monetized it (that is, advertising), then the real work can begin to right-size the industry and focus efforts where they deliver the most value.

There is real risk that the result would be even more “circular media,” in which celebrities are first manufactured and then covered by the same media organizations as if they were of real consequence (Jon & Kate and Lindsay Lohan represent two train wrecks in which the front of the train has crashed into its own caboose).

But I’m more optimistic than that. I have enough faith left that if news businesses got serious about charging for the news, they would eventually achieve market balance – knowing how much to spend, and optimizing that for the best impact, as defined by consumers.

I’m hoping the Gray Lady of New York is ready to give it a try.

Rocky Mountain News closes for the 3rd time

The Rocky Mountain Independent has closed just two months after it started. The Independent was formed from the ashes of InDenverTimes.com – which actually still exists as a free information site, but not with any of the well-intentioned people who started it five months before the Independent.

Both of these were created by jobless journalists jilted by the February closing of the 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News.

The closing is sad, but predictable. The online-only effort at covering news in Denver was started for the wrong reasons (early-onset nostalgia), it had an implausible business model (premium priced news content), and it was run by the wrong people (journalists).

For the ultimate review on the subject, check out Alan Mutter’s Newsosaur blog. Everything he writes about this episode is spot-on and couldn’t be said any better.

But I will emphasize one point: Once upon a time, the news business might have been about the quality of reporting. And I know that some very strong journalism schools are still teaching that it still is. What else should they teach: mediocrity?

But it’s dead wrong. With the exception of some notable niches, content today is judged on a strictly pass-fail basis. It is either not good enough, or it is good enough.

For most media today, there is no ROI in anything that aspires to be better than good enough.

I’m not saying that great journalism doesn’t have a redeeming social value. Of course it does. It’s the bedrock of democracy; it’s the record of humanity.

There’s just no money in it.

Trouble with democracy: It doesn’t pay well

If there’s anything I write about or comment on that is sure to draw a hot and negative response, it’s the insistence that journalists start to get in tune with their true market value. It’s not that I don’t see a huge social value to the work they do. I credit journalists with keeping our democracy alive. But they’ve never been paid by democracy; they get paid by a business model.

My point is twofold:

Journalists have always been part of someone else’s business model. But it’s generally only in times like this, when the business models are under fire, that journalists are compelled to recognize it.
While traditional media models are under siege, journalists themselves are becoming part of the solution — developing new models and new approaches to paying the true cost for news. (For example, check out Spot.us and MedCityNews.)

Today’s e-mail brought an item from one of my favorite blogs, Seth Godin’s Blog. He usually has something insightful to say about the way the world works. But this is the first time I’ve ever seen his blog address the media world directly.

His message (you should read it yourself; it’s short) is simply this: Journalists can be measured for the interest their stories generate — as evidenced by a Washington Post columnist who was let go because his blog posts didn’t generate enough traffic. In every other industry, people’s performance is measured against specific objectives.

It’s happening now with journalists — bringing them into intimate business contact for whatever business model employs them.

Coming face to face with reality can be a painful experience, but in the working world there is really nothing more important.

Even low-cost social media campaigns need to be measured

There is an entire industry of consultants that didn’t exist three years ago, telling people how to collect thousands of followers on Twitter; how to gain friends and fans on Facebook; and how to leverage large networks on LinkedIn. These consultants are writing books, conducting web-seminars and selling services.

The thing that gets too little attention is what all this is worth? Sure, you can grab a small nation’s worth of Twitter followers, but will it make you any money if they aren’t paying attention to your Tweets?

So it was refreshing to stumble across a new series or articles in Computerworld on How to measure the ROI of social media.

It would be nice if there were a few key metrics and some nice neat formulas you could follow, but social media is evolving too quickly and the measurements aren’t that simple.

In the end, if you want to know whether your time with social media is well spent, you need to do the following:

Set a meaningful goal. Is the purpose of your social media outreach simply to gain followers? Then you’ll have an easy time measuring, and a hard time proving that the effort was worthwhile. Instead, set a more specific goal, like this: To generate sales of $XXX (or X number of sales transactions) from members of our social media network.

That way, you’ll not only have a pass/fail measurement, you’ll learn something important along the way: i.e., how many new connections it takes to achieve a sale.

Assign specific tasks. If more than one person is going to be involved in the social media effort, make sure that each person knows his or her specific role. For instance, one person might conduct the outbound communications while another works to convert inbound communications into leads, and still another works to close sales.

This way, the entire job will get done — not just the fun part of blogging and tweeting. Further, when things don’t go perfectly (they won’t), you’ll have a team of experts who can figure out what adjustments to make.

Track everything. Time is money. So while social media programs are astonishingly inexpensive in terms of hard cost, you’ll want to know how much of each day your team members are spending on social media vs. their other responsibilities.

If you do these three things, then measuring gets easy. If you have goals, an organized work effort and good data, determining whether your resources are well-spent will be easy. Just like the example of Reality Digital, also from Computerworld.

Not-for-profit news is no panacea

In the effort to save newspapers, one idea that’s been passed around is that of the newspaper as a not-for-profit institution. The argument is that its role is so central to the public good that it can be protected as a non-taxed, not-for-profit entity.

While the argument may be compelling, I don’t think you can call it mainstream. Well-known newspaper analyst Lauren Rich Fine says for-profit newspapers haven’t done all they can to adapt to new market realities. I agree; Newspapers in the United States have been for-profit ventures for their entire existence, and just because their business model is being challenged today doesn’t mean their industry is obsolete.

But that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with a news organization that does figure out how to succeed as a non-profit.

An increasing number of non-profit news organizations exist, such as MinnPost and the hyperlocal, hypermodest Heights Observer, for which I’m an active volunteer — and which is part of a growing list of other loosely affiliated Observer projects in and around Greater Cleveland. (Not all of them are not-for-profit; they have in common technology platform — Ninth Estate Software — and a singular evangelist, Jim O’Bryan, founder of the for-profit Lakewood Observer).

A not-for-profit trial balloon has been floated (and seems to be losting altitude) for the troubled Boston Globe.

Now, one of the existing not-for-profits is going the other way; Geoff Dougherty, editor of the 4-year-old Chi-Town Daily News (Chicago) writes in his blog that the non-profit experiment is over. He says the online citizen journalism news organization needs $1-2 million a year in donations to fulfill its mission. With grants running out and grant-sources ready to move on to other projects, Dougherty indicates private donations peaked at only $300,000 — and even that amount is doubtful this year.

“We are talking with local nonprofits that have expressed an interest in acquiring the [Chi-Town Daily News] website and neighborhood reporting program,” Dougherty writes.

“Ultimately,” he continued, “we believe we will be able to fulfill the same mission we set out to accomplish with the Daily News, though with a new name, a new company, and a different business structure.”