Comments (1)

By admin, February 4, 2010 7:10 pm

These guys get it.  They really, really get it.  Sure, its boring stuff that they cover on eHow.com and the rest of their properties, but the content seems highly monetizable to us.   I recall talking to publishers about this kind of low-end content two and a half years ago.  The appeal at the time (and to this day) is that the content is highly findable, routinely searched and it provides a very nice context for advertisers or sponsors.  An article on "how to de-ice your sidewalk" is read by folks who are likely to be motivated buyers of de-icing products who have implicitly targeted themselves pretty directly.  At the time, these publishers were horrified at the prospect of producing this kind of content.  Last year, when I introduced the same idea, they were certainly more receptive.  We are now working with a few publishers who want to move this forward in specific content verticals.

Traditional publishers are going to lose a significant share of ad revenue to Demand Media and the like

At storycurator.com, our intention is to bring the Demand Media story to as many media companies as we can – if only to get their reaction and feedback.  My sense is that there will be resistance to the idea of mimicking this approach, which is unfortunate.  With their established sales forces and their relationships with advertisers and agencies, media companies have a current advantage and a window of time to make this model or something similar work.

If a media company tells us that they aren’t in the business of writing this kind of content, then we will be obliged to suggest that Demand and those like them will be taking ad dollars right out of their pockets.  This will happen for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the likely performance of campaigns embedded in this highly relevant content.

We wouldn’t necessarily suggest that recognized media brands sully themselves by focusing exclusively in simple, service media – but we recommend some move towards the tools and approach used by Demand for editorial planning.

Demand Media-style content provides a better context for advertisers than traditional publishers’ editorial choices allow

It is also worth noting that the traditional media companies operating today were the only game in town ten or even five years ago.  Broadcast and publishing, as mediums, were too expensive to produce stories on "how to de-ice your sidewalk".  The web makes content so easy and cheap to produce – and so findable – that the kind of content that media companies have historically produced, because consumers demanded it, is now, potentially, not the best content for advertisers.  Demand is showing us how a whole new category of content is going to sneak up and take advertising dollars from traditional media because, frankly, it is content that sells snow-blowers and de-icing agents while traditional editorial content, entertainment and news does not.   Oh, and by the way, we don’t think social media sells this stuff either.  More on that in another post.

When contextually targeted ads can outperform media buys for reach by 400%, advertisers will notice

Sure, I hear you saying that media companies still have reach, and reach matters.  Granted, but we see reach in the traditional sense declining in importance.  Perhaps reach across an aggregation of properties via an ad network will still matter, but even that is a point for future debate.

Have a read of this Wired Magazine article to get a full sense of what Demand is really all about.  I’m not sure about Demand’s focus on video.  That seems strange to me, but their algorithms for targeting findable, highly sought after easily monetizable content is groundbreaking and gamechanging:

Demand Media | Magazine.

Comments (2)

By admin, January 31, 2010 7:59 pm

We have all worked with web analytics tools at one time or another to understand how well the site is performing.  Google Analytics,  Omniture, WebTrends – all of them are great tools – but we are not convinced we use them as well as we could.

The media properties that we have been associated with tend to look at total site traffic in aggregate over long periods or, if they ever get into the details, they tend to look at the site section by section.  Often, they will even look at the performance of an individual article.  In fact, it is at the most granular level that analytics become the most helpful and drive the most insight.  Sadly, we have rarely seen much insight drawn from these numbers.

We propose that media companies need to turn web analytics on its ear.  They need to take a bit of a different cut on the data to make it really meaningful.  Also, no one tool can currently deliver the type of data that good curators will need to manage their portfolio of topics.  We haven’t seen a perfect combination of tools but, looking across sources, here is what we should measure:

• leading indicators of interest in a topic: even before the first article gets written, use data to help identify what we should be writing about.  Demand Media, arguably THE biggest media success story of the last few years, bases their business on this practice.
• story type and investment profile: patterns in data related to a story or topic can suggest a certain trajectory or story type; e.g. evergreen with growth potential vs explosive but short-lived types.  Different story types deserve different levels of investment in time and resources and, likely, create different monetization opportunities.
• performance of story elements and multi-variate tests: determine what story elements work the best; this will likely differ by the type of story.  Use A/B or multi-variate testing if you have access to the required tools.  This will tell you if you are assembling your stories in a compelling and usable way.
• depth of visit/engagement in the topic: at a glance, measure how many pages deep your users go in a specific story.  Sure, topics can be linked and the lines between stories can be blurred, but do your best as this is a critical measure.  While depth of visit on the overall site is an important traditional measure, engagement in a single story more directly correlates to the performance of contextual ad units – which will become  a critical measure in its own right.
• contextual ad unit performance: while not all ads can be measured this way, those with a clear call to action and a conversion objective ought to be measured within each individual story to see if the rich context of a well-curated story makes a difference.  This is a critical selling point of story curation.  For this to be meaningful, the story topic must have some contextual link to the ad itself, i.e. the ad should relate to the story.  We expect that some types of stories will perform better than others, but, overall, good curation should yield the kind of ad unit performance numbers that you will want to take to media buyers and advertisers.

These new categories of measurement, plus all of the other traditional analytics data, are crucial to effective curation.  In fact, it goes beyond just helping tune the story, it also helps prove the model.  Supportive data across these areas of measurement is ultimately critical to proving the benefits of story curation – including the monetization of properly curated content.

As far as publishing goes, gone are the days of post it, forget it, move on.