executive
Over the past many years, we have all seen the tremendous shift in how we, as publishers, are measuring traffic. Many of the larger publishers have now built or implemented analytics systems that are designed specifically for their needs, and we constantly hear about new efforts to identify critical metrics about our audiences.
This is all really exciting, but in this Plus report, I want to look at a specific subset of this, which is the amazing difference between the metrics we use for advertising, and what we use to measure subscribers. Because, as I wrote in the title, advertising analytics is from Mars, whereas subscriber analytics is from Venus ... they are nothing alike.
Let's start by talking about the simplest example of all. What is a view?
Anyone who has ever had to deal with advertising knows that the way the industry defines a view is ...well ...crap.
For instance, the official standard from IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) is that an ad view is when 50% of the ad is visible for 1 second (two seconds for a video ad).
I mean... what the heck?
Everyone knows that this has nothing to do with a view. I would even go so far as to call this fraud. If you only see half an ad for one second, you haven't actually seen the ad at all.
It's the same with any other platform that is designed for advertising. On Facebook, for instance, a view is defined after 3 or 10 seconds. But again, think about how insane this is.
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Baekdal is a magazine for media professionals, focusing on media analysis, trends, patterns, strategy, journalistic focus, and newsroom optimization. Since 2010, it has helped publishers in more than 40 countries, including big and small publishers like Condé Nast, Bonnier, Schibsted, NRC, and others, as well as companies like Google and Microsoft.
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"Thomas Baekdal is one of Scandinavia's most sought-after experts in the digitization of media companies. He has made himself known for his analysis of how digitization has changed the way we consume media."
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