Jeff Jarvis in the Media Guardian:
Just when we were getting used to it, the page view has been declared dead. There are many reasons for its passing, having to do with how web pages are now made and how web content is now distributed. But there is one seismic implication to this - in media, mass is over. Size doesn't matter.You see, overall circulation mattered only when you and your ads were stuck in the same pages with many other advertisers and you all got the same audience, whether that audience gave a damn about you or not. But now, online, you could find better ways to reach just the people you wanted or who wanted you. Thus, travel advertisers needn't care about the circulation of Guardian Unlimited, only about who saw their ads on travel pages. Now add to this the widgetisation of the web. Content may be displayed not only on your pages but also in widgets - boxes, gadgets and applications - that are embedded in pages elsewhere. This is how much of MySpace is built and how YouTube spreads video all over the internet. The audience becomes the distributor. How do you count that?And consider Google AdSense modules that are spread all across the web, from NYTimes.com to my humble blog. Shouldn't each of those be counted as Google page views since Google revenue is attached? Doesn't that make Google look even more gigantic than it already is? What this really means is that in the new distributed media economy, owning a site doesn't matter so much as enabling a network.
Just when we were getting used to it, the page view has been declared dead. There are many reasons for its passing, having to do with how web pages are now made and how web content is now distributed. But there is one seismic implication to this - in media, mass is over. Size doesn't matter.
You see, overall circulation mattered only when you and your ads were stuck in the same pages with many other advertisers and you all got the same audience, whether that audience gave a damn about you or not. But now, online, you could find better ways to reach just the people you wanted or who wanted you. Thus, travel advertisers needn't care about the circulation of Guardian Unlimited, only about who saw their ads on travel pages.
Now add to this the widgetisation of the web. Content may be displayed not only on your pages but also in widgets - boxes, gadgets and applications - that are embedded in pages elsewhere. This is how much of MySpace is built and how YouTube spreads video all over the internet. The audience becomes the distributor. How do you count that?
And consider Google AdSense modules that are spread all across the web, from NYTimes.com to my humble blog. Shouldn't each of those be counted as Google page views since Google revenue is attached? Doesn't that make Google look even more gigantic than it already is? What this really means is that in the new distributed media economy, owning a site doesn't matter so much as enabling a network.
But more fundamental than all this is, again, that size doesn't matter anymore, not in media. Oh, yes, the movie with the biggest box office or the book with the biggest sales still makes the most money - for now at least. But in more and more of the media, mass measurements are obsolete because we are now fragmented into the mass of niches. And the truth is that we, the audience, never cared how many more people were watching what we watched. And advertisers don't care so much what we're watching so long as we're watching them.In a world of so many choices, the audience care about trust, taste, relevance, usefulness, not ratings. And advertisers care more about targeting, efficiency, engagement, branding and return on investment. These are better measurements than print circulation or broadcast ratings or online page views. And so now, publishers, advertisers and technologists must catch up and change their yardsticks for success yet again. It is time to measure quality over quantity.
But more fundamental than all this is, again, that size doesn't matter anymore, not in media. Oh, yes, the movie with the biggest box office or the book with the biggest sales still makes the most money - for now at least. But in more and more of the media, mass measurements are obsolete because we are now fragmented into the mass of niches. And the truth is that we, the audience, never cared how many more people were watching what we watched. And advertisers don't care so much what we're watching so long as we're watching them.
In a world of so many choices, the audience care about trust, taste, relevance, usefulness, not ratings. And advertisers care more about targeting, efficiency, engagement, branding and return on investment. These are better measurements than print circulation or broadcast ratings or online page views. And so now, publishers, advertisers and technologists must catch up and change their yardsticks for success yet again. It is time to measure quality over quantity.
Robin Grant
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