Tags containing: "time-based measurement"

Why Slate picked engaged time as their north star metric

October 24, 2017 Melissa Bierly, Product Marketing Manager—Parse.ly

On their 20th birthday last September, the digital magazine Slate reported 17,000 paying subscribers for their membership program, Slate Plus. Today, that number is at 35,000.

The surge in subscribers owes in part to the Trump bump—Slate Plus membership jumped by 46% after the election. But the underlying catalyst is that Slate has gone all-in on loyalty to lower their dependence on platforms like Facebook and monetize their incredibly loyal audience. By launching new podcasts (and using them as platforms to promote Slate Plus), revamping their newsletter, and doubling down on comment moderation, Slate has committed to creating engaging content that keep readers coming back.

That commitment necessitated a shift in how Slate thought about measurement, moving away from a focus on unique visitors to a metric that matched their primary goal. Establishing engaged time as a “North Star metric” enabled teams across the organization to put loyalty at the forefront of their initiatives.

Connecting the dots between audience loyalty and engaged time

Digiday’s Lucia Moses regarded Slate’s loyalty initiative with a healthy amount of skepticism: “Introducing a new measurement approach isn’t easy, though. Publishers may like to talk about engagement, but there’s no industry standard for it. … And measuring loyalty, as Slate is trying to do, is murky anyway.”

In short, fostering a loyal audience sounds great… but how do you measure it in a way that makes sense for the whole company? That’s a question Slate’s Director of Research Anna Gilbert has spent a lot of time thinking about.

Gilbert and her team considered the number of unique visits and returning visitors to represent loyalty, among other metrics. Ultimately, they chose total engaged time—how long visitors actively read, watch, or listen to a piece of content—because it helped them measure the sincerity of their visitors. “When we have first time visitors that come to Slate and read two or three articles and spend a minute and a half or two minutes, we want that to be reported and credited in this loyalty initiative. And we think that those everyday visitors, or those twice-a-week visitors, are also captured really well,” said Gilbert. “They’re worth far more than drive-by visitors who quickly leave the site.”

Wherever a reader is in the funnel, whether they’re a first time or everyday visitor, Slate is now able to answer the question: “Are they staying on Slate longer?”

Implementing a new metric and acting on insights

Gilbert acknowledged that rolling out new metrics can be hard because it requires figuring out how you move the needle. “If you write more stories, that leads to higher unique visitors. It’s a pretty clear relationship. If you’re at the end of the month and you’re not close to your goal, you know tangibly what you can do. Whereas with engaged time, the levers are not as clear. You need to figure out how to reframe your thinking around it.”

Slate’s partnership with Parse.ly has helped every team to align behind engaged time as their core metric. “Seeing engaged time in the Parse.ly dashboard helped us make a much smoother transition from unique visitors and the Big Bang Facebook days to a more real relationship with our most loyal readers,” said Gilbert.

The editorial team uses the Parse.ly dashboard to track which stories are getting the most engagement, while the sales team employs it for storytelling to prospects. The product team uses Parse.ly’s API to power Slate’s infinite scroll reading experience, which recommends relevant content once a reader has finished an article. As for identifying levers, Gilbert’s team is analyzing raw engagement data made available through Parse.ly’s Data Pipeline to identify factors—like referral traffic or publication time—that correlate with a high amount of engaged time.

What about staff working on Slate Plus? “They’re one of the most data driven teams at Slate. They’re constantly using Parse.ly to monitor engaged time in combination with subscription and marketing data from other sources to figure out what’s working or where new opportunities might lie,” said Gilbert.

The future of monetizing loyal audiences

As more and more publishers turn their sights to subscriptions as a viable source of revenue, Slate’s journey to fully focusing on loyalty offers a roadmap to success.

And Gilbert has hopes that the industry at large will come to see the value of standardizing engaged time. “When our sales team goes out and does pitches, they definitely talk about Slate’s loyal visitors and how much time they spend with our content. But they still show the UV number. I think establishing a clearer relationship between engaged time and revenue generation—so that we’re talking about revenue per minute instead of revenue per pageview—will help frame why engaged time matters for more than just editorial tracking.”

Industry-Research | Perspectives

Making metrics meaningful: Benchmarking engaged time

October 3, 2016 DCN

“What if we stopped focusing so much on traffic, and started focusing on experience?” I’m asked this question frequently. It’s a complex, divisive challenge for newsrooms, one I eagerly indulge.

I work directly with media companies of all shapes and sizes. I offer consultation on everything from using data to support editorial intuition, experimenting with audience development projects and honing tagging strategies. The best newsroom strategies start with someone saying to me: “It would be so interesting if we could…” and “What would happen if we tried…”. Data can provide the foundation for sussing out those new ideas while mitigating risk.

When I start to talk to clients about using engaged time, or any metric for that matter, the key is to set goals. What does success look like? But this prompts new questions: How do we stack up? Is this kind of engagement normal? Is it good? For us? For anyone?

There is no reliable comScore or Alexa rating for attention, thanks in no small part to various ways of measuring “time on site.” So if a publisher is eager to change the way they think about their audience, and their success, where could they start? I tried to find out.

How does Parse.ly measure engaged time?

First, let’s clarify exactly what we’re talking about, because Parse.ly measures engaged time differently than other analytics platforms. On your site, a visitor is considered “engaged” if they 1.) Have a browser tab open, and 2.) take an action (scroll, click, mouse-over) at least once every ten seconds.

For more details, feel free to browse this explainer on Parse.ly engaged time, or for a more technical explanation, read our engaged time technical documentation.

Analysis 1: How do we find an average engaged time for all content?

Weighted engaged time averages from a random sample of posts from 300 domains in our network gives a benchmark for engaged time.

I first set up an exploratory analysis across our network, to see if I could identify any clear patterns. Over time, I started to see the same sites consistently outperform other outlets in average engaged time per visitor. What initially struck me though was actually the lack of pattern: each site seemed so diverse in voice and size.

To identify what made them competitive, I needed to understand the bigger picture of engaged time across Parse.ly’s network. To do this, I sampled user experiences at random for content published within one month from 300 anonymized domains to first understand, “how many seconds can you expect a typical reader to remain engaged with a story?”

Here we see how attentiveness is distributed across Parse.ly’s network. This graph shows what we can expect for “normal” attention time from any given reader, to any given article for each of the sampled domains. You can see a majority of our publishers attract an audience willing to invest roughly 40-60 seconds of their time on an article, though plenty of publishers can expect a more invested audience.

Finding engaged time in Parse.ly’s dashboard

This provided a starting point for benchmarking engaged time, especially for my clients. Any Parse.ly user can easily find in their dashboard where their site, section or article falls on this curve. Teams can check to see if their stories and authors fall above or below the norm for their audience.

Understanding the context here is crucial though; not every article needs to outperform the average of the Entire Internet. There are better questions to ask. Where does your article fit in relation to what is expected for its section? How does that section perform in relation to the site as a whole?

Of course, there’s one more comparison that everyone wants to make: how does my site stack to the competition?

Analysis 2: How do we find the averaged engaged time for similar content?

This question helps you contextualize whether your work gets more attention than pieces that are similar to it and potentially predict how other topics, outside of your core competencies, might perform. For example, if you don’t normally write technology feature, it could help to understand the engaged time benchmark for tech publishing leaders. Here, we break down the analysis above further to understand how long a reader could be engaged on similar content.

Broken out by publisher type, it’s easy to see how nuanced attentiveness is across different types of content. I found it noteworthy that local news sites command more engagement than major news outlets, even with undoubtedly fewer resources.

I mentioned earlier when I began investigating engagement, I was struck by how, month after month, the same set of publishers kept leading the pack, albeit with no discernible pattern among them. Broadening the analysis to the network, broken down by these categories, most of these names resurfaced at the top of their respective categories. A pattern finally became clear: the most engaging sites within each type of publisher were highly recognizable brand names.

Also, now that we’ve broken out engaged time averages across Parse.ly’s network, it’s easy to see how using homogenized data from a heterogenous group of sites to set benchmarks could do more harm than good. Certainly, the same concept applies within the newsroom; measuring the average engaged time on an article against what is expected for that vertical or topic will provide better context.

What do we know about engaged readers?

We’ll continue to explore other patterns within the most engaging experiences. In the meantime, here’s a reminder of what we do know:

Facebook vs Twitter. We already know from a recent study with Pew Research that, in an increasingly mobile ecosystem, referral sources on mobile were an important factor in determining engaged time. Their research found that Tumblr and Twitter generate highly engaged audiences, while Facebook audiences were less engaged.
Readers can be highly engaged on mobile, though infrequently. In another section of the same report, we distinguished between long-form articles with 1000+ words and short-form articles. Long-form consistently outperformed short-form, though visitors to either do not frequently go on to other articles.
In the analysis conducted for this post, we found no correlation between page views and engaged time. A large audience is not necessarily an attentive one.

How to navigate this brave new world

We’ve found ourselves in somewhat uncharted territory in an effort to shift away from primary traffic metrics like page views and unique visitors. How do we define what makes something “good” anymore? Why should we care about engaged time at all?

As I found in this analysis, the engaged time metric provides us an interesting exploration in how we can set a more relevant benchmark. In clinging to familiar traffic indicators like page views, perhaps we have systematically neglected not only the experience of our readers, but the nuance of our reporting. But coupling traffic metrics with engaged time helps us understand which articles create the most impact.

If your post gets hundreds of thousands of viral views, but no one sticks around to read it, did you really manage to convey anything meaningful? Increasing your newsroom’s dedication to understanding the relevancy of engagement in all its forms will lead to a deeper, better audience strategy.

Kelsey Arendt is a Customer Success Manager at Parse.ly. Previously, she worked with The Guardian’s commercial team where she managed a variety of projects for marketing and sales, including developing analytic support for sponsored campaigns and partner hubs. Kelsey is a Midwestern transplant to New York City, and is a passionate hiker, musician, and homebrewer.

Industry-Research

Editorial analytics sharpen newsrooms’ focus

February 24, 2016 DCN

News organization everywhere are competing for attention. In a continuously changing media environment, journalism is challenged more than ever before to connect to its audience. In its report, the Digital News Project 2016, Reuters Institute examined how news organizations, across Europe and the United States, analyze their audience’s behavior in order to inform and develop their editorial voices.

The Guardian and The Financial Times, both subscription-based business models, developed proprietary metric tools. The Guardian’s real-time analytics tool called Orphan offers minute-by-minute data on individual articles like pageviews, social shares, and attention-time for each article published in the last two weeks. Orphan can also show whether the article has been pushed via the Guardian’s social media channels and/or if it was promoted on the homepage. The data can also be broken down by different segments, such as time, section, device, browser, country, referrer, loyalty, and attention time. The editors can use this data to inform decisions on headlines, pictures, placement, and how to promote across social media channels.

Similarly, the Financial Times’s is developing a dashboard for its analytics called, Lantern. The Financial Times see editorial analytics as a step to its newsroom and its reporters being audience-first journalists, integrating engagement objectives into the editorial process. The tool will focus mostly on engagement-related metrics such as time spent, recirculation, volume of articles read per visit, and number of comments.

The report identified a few third party analytic tools available to news organization:

Chartbeat known for real-time analytics that focus on audience attention. Its dashboard advices on homepage structure and helps to refine headlines and formats. Editors can modify content in real-time.
Ly tracks in real-time as well and helps to identify topics audiences have responded well to in the past as well as where readers are coming from, where they’re headed next and on what devices.
NewsWhip is also a real-time tool that offers social media tracking like tweets, shares, and comments. It also allows newsrooms to monitor what stories are trending and breaking news.

In addition to Chartbeat, Parse.Ly and NewsWhip, the more standardized report of pageviews and visits are available in analytics tools like Omniture, google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and twitter Analytic.

Usage of multiple data sources is also common among news organizations. The Huffington Post, an advertising based business model, uses an Omniture dashboard, which includes traditional metrics like visits, pageviews, and unique visitors as well as referrals from specific sources and video data. They also use a customized version of Chartbeat tracking real-time split testing where different versions of an article (copy, headline and/or pictures) are tested to see which performs best.

Importantly, even in the most data-driven analysis, decisions often involve qualitative assessment. It’s a mix of art and science. It’s also important to ensure personal assessment is included especially in terms of how the data is leveraged for both short-term and long-term operations.

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue

Time well spent? Inside the FT’s time-based ads sales effort

November 11, 2015 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

When it comes to finite resources, perhaps none is so keenly felt as the limited number of hours in the day. And, as more content creators vie for this precious time—across a proliferation of delivery platforms and devices—creators of digital content have steadily seen their online objectives reduced to a frantic race for audience numbers, pageviews and click-throughs. Some leaders in the industry, however, are looking to change the conversation to one where time spent is the metric that matters.

Last fall, the Financial Times began testing ad sales based upon a new cost-per-hour (CPH) metric. Its initial foray went well and in May of this year they announced the official launch of a new time-based measurement system. The FT’s US Commercial Director, Brendan Spain, says the decision to initiate a new method for transacting ad value based upon time was prompted by an increasing sense among marketers that they their digital ad investments might not be as valuable as once thought, given revelations of high bot traffic and ad-viewability limitations.

“We decided that, given our audience, as well as the registration and subscription information we have behind our readership, that we had an opportunity to go the other way to create a very transparent product that marketers could be confident in,” says Spain. Now, a year after this idea was conceived, Spain believes that the need for better metrics is at least as great—if not greater—than it was then.

In part, the need stems from new concerns over agency rebates, which have increased the demand for transparency into the ad-buying landscape. However, Spain says that he’s also seeing an increased desire for brand dollars to be allocated to digital, which requires publishers to deliver more substantive KPIs, beyond the click. Spain notes that “There’s no KPI-uplift for clicking” while CPH measurement, on the other hand, “offers recognition that there are marketers are doing something besides trying to sell a pizza, that there are other KPIs that need to be looked at.”

That said, despite a desire for something better, there’s still a hill to climb in terms of getting any new metric to gain wide acceptance. “There’s not a line for CPH on agency spreadsheets and let’s face it, those spreadsheets are a window into the minds in the middle- and back-office,” Spain says, emphasizing the need for education on both the client and agency sides.

There is also a question of standardizing the time-based metric in order for it to scale. The Economist recently rolled out its own take on selling time-based advertising. Unlike the FT, The Economist opted to cap its attention measurement at 30 seconds. The Wall Street Journal has also reportedly explored a time-based approach that would be based upon incremental blocks of time. Differing models can create confusion in the marketplace, though Spain points out that it is still early days and the FT is among an increasing number of publishers testing out what makes the most sense. The important thing, he says, is that “the vast majority of premium publishers agree that time is transactable.”

To date, the FT has worked with 15 brands on 19 campaigns. Eight percent of their digital inventory is being served through CPH, a number Spain says adds up to a not-insignificant amount of incremental revenue on the FT’s P&L. The positive impact also affects its advertisers who are seeing 10% more active time in view than if they purchased CPM campaign. They are also currently in the process of surveying all of its clients who have tested CPH buying so far to better evaluate and document its effectiveness. “Everything we’re doing is evidence based,” says Spain. “It is really important that we’re not just putting a finger in the air.”

Despite its promise, time-based sales are not right for every campaign. As Spain points out, CPH works best to achieve objectives such as ad recall, brand awareness and recognition, and purchase consideration. He also doesn’t foresee the FT moving entirely away from CPM-based sales, though he points out they’ve never been a CPC environment. By Q1, his goal is for all of the FT’s top clients to be aware of CPH and see its value based upon evidence-based case studies.

There are metrics that can be very easily manipulated, says Spain. “You can buy likes, retweets, followers—all that takes is a five minute Google search to figure out how.” What needs to be emphasized, however, is that there are things you can’t buy. “You can’t add another hour to a CEOs day to read a publication. We need to un-muddy the waters. One of the ways to do that is to focus on metrics that are a lot harder to fudge.”

As he considers the bigger digital advertising picture, Spain has high hopes: He believes that an attention-based approach can bring more brand ad dollars to quality partners; increase marketer confidence that their ads are being seen and are engaging consumers; give publishers a means to value attention at a scaled level rather than a flat rate; and maybe even drive some of the bad inventory out of consideration or drive it out of the market altogether.

Industry-Research

Pew’s State of the News Media: The Mobile Majority

April 29, 2015 Research Team—DCN

The Pew Research Center has released its 12^th annual State of the News Media Report, which it has broken down into 13 areas of interest:

Local TV News
Network News
Cable News
Audio
Podcasting
Public Broadcasting
Newspapers
News Magazines
Alternative Weeklies
Digital News Revenue
Digital News Audience
African American Media
Hispanic Media

This year, Pew is leading with the impact of mobile, noting that at the start of the year, 39 of the top 50 digital news websites derive more traffic from mobile devices than from desktop computers.

Among Pew’s Findings:

For half of the top 50 news sites, desktop visitors spent at least 10% more time per visit than did those coming to the site or app on their mobile device. For another 15, the time spent was roughly equal.
Podcast listening is on the rise: As of January 2015, 35% of cellphone-owning adults have listened to online radio in the car, up from 21% in 2013.
Mobile devices are increasingly the preferred way to listen to podcasts. Of 2.6 billion podcast downloads in 2014, 63% were requested from mobile devices – up from 43% in 2012.
Though digital ad revenue across all media grew 18% in 2014, for legacy news sectors “significant digital revenues remain largely on the wish list.”
Most newspaper reading still happens in print. Only 5% read newspapers exclusively on mobile devices.
Newspaper print ads are producing less revenue (down 5%), while digital ads are producing more revenue (up 3%) – but not enough to make up for the fall in print revenue.

Perspectives

Time is Money in the Attention Economy

January 15, 2015 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

Time is money: true. But time, as it turns out, may not always be on our side.

The web is awash with stories about ad viewability problems and the need for measurement standards. The hard truth is that because we can count clicks, we do. Yet almost anyone really thinking about the true measure of digital content success realizes that a click might measure little more than clumsy fingers or fleeting glances. What content creators—whether from media or marketing—really want is engagement. And, as DCN research recently revealed, an emerging measure of engagement is time spent.

Yet as anyone with an overstuffed inbox and more push notifications than they can handle will attest, there are never enough hours in a day to do what we need to do, much less read everything we want to. Time is among people’s most valuable resources therefore if a consumer spends time with content, we can assume that the content provides them some value.

This topic is so meaty and relevant to aspects of our business both today and in the future, we decided to make the theme of our annual member’s-only DCN Summit this year: “The Attention Economy.” We’ll examine how everyone in the digital media business needs to put the customer first and create experiences that make the most of their valuable time.

One of the most vocal champions of time based measurement is Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat, who will team up with Brendan Spain, the FT’s US Commercial Director to discuss the real-world applications of time as a metric for advertising performance. The FT has been an early mover in selling display advertising based upon the amount of time its audience spends with content. Spain plans to come armed with FT data generated by the first six months of experimentation with this strategy to provide insights into whether or not time spent with an ad message does, in fact, generate greater measureable impact.

Demonstrating engagement on one platform is challenging enough, but many media organizations reach consumers across a broad range of channels and need to measure the entirety of their audience. At this year’s Summit, three organizations—ESPN, NBCUniversal and AOL’s Adapt.tv—will explore how they are tackling cross platform measurement.

While advertising is certainly an important means to deliver advertising, an increasing number of brands compete for consumer attention with content. Dick’s Sporting Goods has gone all-in on content and Brand Director, Frank Igrec plans to reveal his beguilingly simple content marketing strategy: create content people actually find compelling. Attendees will also hear from Delta Airlines, which approaches content as a means to of super-serving its customers, as well as Mt. Dew, which has found content to be the best way to reinforce its brand among its millennial target. These sessions will look at the innovative work these organizations are doing to step up their content game in order to attract and genuinely engage audiences.

Perspectives

Digging Deep into Attention and Metrics that Matter

January 6, 2015 Jason Kint, CEO – DCN

I was thrilled to see an industry visionary like Ev Williams tackle the measurement discussion with his post “A mile wide, an inch deep” and advocate the use of a dimension beyond simply unique visitors.

We agree that time is a critical dimension and arguably the most important one as noted in our recent report “How Time-based Measurement is Grabbing Publishers’ Attention.”

In terms of measuring the quality of an audience, Ev’s “rectangle analogy” nails it.

Ask any junior high student which rectangle is bigger, one that is three inches wide or one that is two-and-a-half inches wide, and they’ll tell you it’s a nonsensical question unless they have more information — specifically, the height.

And yet, we literally say one company or service is “bigger” based on a single number — specifically, number of people who have “used” it in the last 30 days.

A site that attracts one million visitors for 30 seconds per month is an entirely different business than one that attracts one million visitors for 3 hours per month. The same holds true for brand advertising. We will continue to urge the industry to debate and discuss a time-based measurement world, what it means to brand advertisers and how it more correctly aligns the incentives for creating great media. As Ev so eloquently puts it: “Most Internet companies would build better things and create more value if they paid more attention to depth than breadth.”

It’s an Attention Economy. Content is everywhere and so are the consumers. We need to be in the business of making the most of their precious and valuable time. We’ll be exploring this topic in depth at the 13rd Annual Digital Content Next Summit later this month. It is members-only but we’ll be reporting on the insights and major themes on InContext after the event.

Perspectives

Defining Bricks to Build the House of Time and Attention

October 29, 2014 DCN

This year may go down as one of the most pivotal years in the digital revolution as we transition into an AV world (After Viewability).

Vivek Shah, CEO of Ziff-Davis and Chairman of the IAB did a terrific job earlier this month at IAB MIXX and in a WSJ op-ed reinforcing why viewability is critical, while also explaining the important work that still needs to be done. This coincided with the reconvening of the Blue-Ribbon Committee (which I served on in its first phase to define the standard). It also led to the MRC’s advisory to media, which included these important guidelines:

If an impression’s viewability can’t be measured, then it doesn’t mean it’s not viewable or worthless;
It is not realistic (or even possible) to expect 100% viewability so there needs to be a more a measured set of expectations during this complex transition. As Vivek stated, no other media has attempted this level of measurement.

Publishers can’t bear the cost of the entire transition and, as such, the agencies using this opportunity as a price-negotiating tactic are doing a great disservice to the industry, their clients and publishers. Additionally, any marketplace confusion is not helpful in establishing this new currency. It’s why a group of advertisers, agencies and media companies agreed on the standard of 50% of a display ad for a minimum of one second.

Let me illustrate why these points are essential in evolving viewability with a personal story: I have a bedtime routine with our two toddler boys where they can ask dad any question they want to. Any parent reading this will realize that dad often doesn’t know the answers to their questions. Last week, our five year old made some significant inquiries into the nature of bricks: What are they made of? Why are they all the same size? Why do they sometimes have holes in them? How are they so strong? And like many parents out there, after a kiss goodnight, I headed straight to Wikipedia so that I could have better informed answers ready at the breakfast table. It turns out bricks are the same size so that they fit in the mason’s hands and are interchangeable. The mason’s craft shapes these bricks into something useful and enduring.

Viewability is our brick. If we–marketers, publishers and everyone who serves their interests–don’t get it right and make it as strong as it can be, then our building will crumble. Our first go at building this digital landscape was built off of impressions defined by pings of ad servers. It turns out that those ads served weren’t viewable as much as 80% of the time. When technology improvements allowed us to see this problem, the need for a different standard for an impression became clear, preferably one not based on clicks and direct response metrics that undervalue the trust and equity of brand marketers and high quality content companies. The good work of the IAB, ANA and AAAAs has now given us a standard for our brick that is fair to everyone. Rolling it out won’t happen overnight and we all need to share equally in that effort.

But if we can agree that viewability is the brick, then what are we going to build? I believe the answer is the house of time and attention.

I was thrilled with all of the discussion and positive reaction to my column during Advertising Week on Why Attention is Worth More than the Click. Transacting on time was something that we discussed early on in 2012 as the natural next step of viewability and it is clear that, in the intervening years, progress has been made on this front. Here at Digital Content Next (formerly the Online Publishers Association), we conducted research among our members to examine time-based measurement and just last week we released a whitepaper “How time-Based Measurement is Grabbing Digital Publishers’ Attention,” which explores the results. We also had the opportunity to discuss the topic with industry leaders at a private member event.

And the evidence is clear: The time is right to build a more robust and resilient digital ecosystem in which we evaluate engagement and measure impact on something sturdier than crumbling clicks. Viewability is the brick from which we can build meaningful time-based measurement. This will require both strategic and technological changes. At DCN, we recommend that organizations reassess their measurement capabilities; implement viewability (if you’ve not already), report the total attention time on campaigns, whether advertisers ask for it or not; and equip ad operations and yield management teams with the tools to understand the value of the time your audience spends with your content. As Mike Donahue, EVP, 4A’s noted to me recently, this isn’t a quick fix but we know the steps: “Once we have the opportunity to see (viewability) nailed as a first step cross-platform currency, the sequential next step currency is engagement. Short of scalable, affordable neuro measures (of emotional response), time is the best surrogate to measure engagement.”

Perspectives | Revenue

Is Digital Advertising Ready to Ditch the Click?

September 29, 2014 DCN

Views Have Long Been Digital Advertising’s Currency. Those Days May Be Numbered.

It was a was a throwaway line on the 50th slide in a PowerPoint deck. But that seemingly innocuous bullet point — “Time as a currency to trade?” — stands to upend the digital-advertising industry.

In March 2013, Jon Slade, commercial director of digital advertising and insight at the Financial Times, presented the idea to the paper’s Asia sales staff. Next month, the London-based paper will roll out ad rates based on time rather than impressions, charging some advertisers by the number of hours their ads appear in front of targeted groups of readers. The measurement — cost per hour, or CPH — shatters a decades-old media pricing model that values volume above all else…

“We’re definitely challenging the status quo. No one has come up with
a new currency in digital advertising in — a while.”

This moment matters for publishers like the FT, according to Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, formerly the Online Publishers Association. “We’re in a medium that’s fast changing and evolving,” he said.

“I’m hoping we’ll look back a decade from now and see this
as a critical milestone.”

Read more at Advertising Age.