It is the best of times and the worst of times for some businesses. Many look at the world and see the opportunities of being data rich, customer centric, and nimble while others imagine they can bring their old school thinking to the new media, always-on connected customer. They sit cross-fingered hoping that putting lipstick on their pig will improve their results. Let’s explore two publishers making news recently and learn how one is failing while the other has become quite successful.
We will learn from this comparison no matter what type of business we are in.
I love to consume and share content on my iPad. Ask any of the nearly 20-plus million people who have one and I am pretty sure they’ll respond the same way. So you figure when a publishing powerhouse invests an initial $30 million dollars and another $500,000 an issue into an iPad-only publication, how could it go wrong? Well, not all the numbers for The Daily have been revealed (for that you would have to speak to Rupert Murdoch or his Daily staff), but based on recent data and calculations, the results are not very promising. It has been estimated that the app had been downloaded 500,000 times and that 75,000 people have become “regular users” of the app, at least during the extended free trial period. Nevertheless, the tweets per day from the app are on the decline.
If I had to explain to Mr. Murdoch and his team why their paid subscriber to application download conversion rate is so low, I would tell them that while their content is beautiful, the experience of consuming it was painful and slow. People want speed, freshness, and variety. It’s painful to watch all these little boxes on screen while my issue was being delivered and to watch my beard grow as thumbnails of pages loaded. Mr. Murdoch, your publication is obese and crippled.
What has been your experience with The Daily? How would you fix it at this point?
By now I am sure you have heard about the acquisition of The Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million and all the change that has followed that acquisition. The Huffington Post’s news, analysis, and lifestyle website was founded in 2005, which now counts nearly 25 million unique monthly visitors and boasts an affluent, influential audience that is growing at a rate of 22 percent.
You may have heard how The Huffington Post uses real-time testing to write better headlines. Or maybe you heard The Huffington Post’s CTO Paul Berry speak about its Google Analytics deployment and how it uses it:
When the HuffPost publishes a front-page Quick Read or other feature story, Berry and his team can use Analytics to quickly gauge traffic spikes and update the content in minutes to drive the publication’s editorial direction. The editorial calendar stored on Google Calendar is then updated accordingly, giving staff easy access to any changes even if they are on the road. “Overnight, we can shape our feature stories or Quick Read columns and share any changes with everyone on staff to create more targeted, relevant content and attract more viewers.” says Berry.
As important as these data-driven pieces are to the formula, it was only recently when I heard The Huffington Post’s CFO Eric Ashman deliver the Web Analytics Association Gala Awards dinner keynote that I realized how hard-core, data-centric, real-time-enabling, and customer-focused their business was as he spoke about the primary drivers of The Huffington Post business model.
He spoke about the critical importance of having the right reporting structure in place with web analytics data including real-time stats as they relate to the “product” and marketing stats as they impact sales and marketing flowing directly to the office of the CFO and the board of directors. My brother and I have been advocating that for a reporting system to be meaningful, every piece of data must flow into the financial statements since 2001. Eric, as I do, believes “traffic analytics are as core to strategic planning, decision making and building shareholder value as financial statements.”
Several other critical success factors he shared included:
- Getting the technology team support and the importance of being nimble.
- Getting real-time data in the hands of people who can react quickly.
- Starting simple and building from there.
Mr. Murdoch, I truly wish you could have been there to learn.
Do you agree that we can learn from these two very different publishers?
Create relevant and delightful experiences people want to share. Speed up your site, speed up your corporate metabolism, enable everyone to make decisions based on data, and execute rapidly; that is going to be a winning formula for the next several years. Will you be able to keep up?
Excellent post. This line ("Starting simple and building from there.") inspired me the most.
>>Do you agree that we can learn from these two very different publishers?
Absolutely! I am a big proponent of the data driven news room, but then again, as a tech vendor predicting the perfect front page for media I am biased. I do honestly believe that a hunch-driven (humans only) business model is destined to fail in the long term; there is simply no way you can out-maneuver a data centric business model.
I would like to add a cautionary note to the following HuffoPo statement though;
“..use Analytics to quickly gauge traffic spikes and update the content in minutes to drive the publication’s editorial direction”
This is easy to say, but it is actually extremely hard to execute on – and at worst publishers end up creating self-fulfilling prophecies that essentially de-optimize the objective they are trying to achieve. A top 10 list of the most viewed Articles over the last 120 seconds (or last 30 min. if you will) is not really of much use unless you have models in place to interpret that.
Great article Brian! Do come by and visit us soon, would love to show you how we think about increasing the front page performance for news media in particular.
Cheers
d.
CEO Visual Revenue http://visualrevenue.com/blog/
[...] the action you want them to take. Getting your organization to have a culture of testing is even what is setting publishers apart today as [...]
Bryan….
As usual – wonderful post. And, I'm in absolute agreement with the overall critical success factors and your wrap up – suggesting that we need to increase the metabolism of the organization.
But while "real-time" and making the synapse-like connection between analytics and finance may be beneficial for breaking news organizations like HuffPo – for many businesses that kind of monitoring can have unintended and quite negative consequences. It can put unrealistic pressure on marketing teams to keep the graph moving up and to the right rather than making smart, creative – and sometimes "reset" decisions.
It's a little like putting a heart monitor in the doctor's office and asking them to determine whether the patient in the gym two floors below is having a heart attack or running a marathon.
We need to realize that sometimes squeezing that one percent better conversion rate out of a headline won't provide nearly the benefit of using the other half of our brain to dream up something entirely brand new.
Thanks for all the work you and your brother do. As you know – I'm a fan.
~rr
I agree every business does not need this real time focus. However, it is the hope that a marketer will have that next best big idea that keeps them from continuously optimizing all their previous campaigns. It\’s this lack of being accountable and reactive to the metrics and not focused on the demands of a customer based whose expectations are becoming real time that causes a lot of business to not grow at the pace they should.