Analytics, Mobile, Social Media and Digital Marketing Strategy
One of the most difficult analytical challenges facing digital publishers is measuring the effect of quality on revenue and profits.
Quality is a characteristic, much like beauty, that is in the eye of the beholder. What counts as quality content and an excellent user experience to one reader may be shoddy and irritating to another.
Averages lie to you. One of our publishing clients looked at the average sell-through rate of their online advertising inventory and noted it was 70 percent.
“We can launch a metered paywall, and as long as we do not lose more than 30 percent of our inventory, the lost advertising revenue should be minimal,” they thought.
This is a follow-up to an article, “Why do Subscribers Subscribe?”, posted on Web Analytics World in March. The key insight from that article was that engagement with content and the community around that content was crucial for transitioning an anonymous user to a paying subscriber.
Here, we discuss the factors that keep individuals active paying subscribers once they have made that transition.
Let the data talk … but not too much.
We live in a world of data. We also live in a world of inexpensive computer processing. The combination of these two resources means we also live in a world of poor quality statistical analytics.
The future of the news media industry and of content providers is the subscriber. Subscribers will pay to consume and support the production of content that they find important or entertaining. The delivery platform is important, but less so, than the engagement the subscriber has with the content itself.
Print may have a long life ahead of it if the audience will pay for access to the content in that form. Digital platforms will continue to evolve rapidly, likely moving to augmented reality and virtual reality technologies. What is most important for the content developers is the relationship with their customers and the trust that relationship creates.