Alastair Bruce

The BBC has launched a site called Democracy Live. According to The Guardian the site cost £1m to launch, is funded by the BBC’s online budget and will be run by 11 permanent members of staff.

It contains videos of statements and debates, links to political programmes, information on MPS’s expenses, data on who your MP is, guides to the institutions, and blogs from people like Nick Robinson. There’s very little original content written or shot specifically for the site, apart from a couple of articles from John Bercow and Ruth Fox. I might have missed more but there’s certainly not very much.

This is a development several media (and other) organisations should be concerned about. Here’s why:

1. This is a watchdog-type site. People will be able to go in and scrutinise what their politicians are saying in a more useful format than Parliament TV. It treads on the toes of existing sites like TheyWorkForYou. What will happen to these sites that don’t have the backing of licence fees?

2. One million pounds? For what exactly? The salaries of 11 members of staff, video equipment, hosting and streaming costs, some nice speech-to-text technology. These can be expensive, but the scale of this for what is pretty much just an aggregation site surprises me. Who can afford to compete?

3. Lastly, this is a site that will appeal to bloggers and journalists – anyone in fact who wishes to investigate the goings-on of Parliament. By making itself an essential resource, a research tool if you like, the BBC is turning itself into not just a watchdog, but an archive. Potentially the BBC will control what gets investigated through controlling the archive.

It’s cementing its place in journalism and politics but at what cost?

This year’s AOP was an interesting event. These are the points some of the speakers made that I found most thought-provoking, amusing, controversial etc. Some new, some old, some borrowed, some blue… This is not an exhaustive list and if I’ve slightly misquoted then apologies (please get in touch if you feel something should be corrected). Some of it is blatantly paraphrased. Some comments from me in [ ].

David Gilbertson:

Most media has an advertising not a content culture

Is your content really “must have” or just nice to have?

Quite interesting is not enough.

News is always urgent but not always important (and people pay for important)

Shawn Colo

Content is marketing

Social optimization will become more important than SEO

People pay for a combination of voice and product experience [it’s not just the content but how you consume it that matters]

Chris Cramer

CPA – continuous partial attention

Social information is information of the first resort

It’s not multimedia, it’s media.

AOP content and trends census

People expect to charge for apps on mobiles [Don’t build your whole business model on this. Things sometimes start out expensive and become cheap as competition gets tougher. Cheap or free. And look what happened to apps on Facebook.]

Luke Bradley Jones

There are not enough advertising dollars in the world to support the Internet [Maybe not currently but spend is growing (it’s overtaken TV in the UK) and targetting of ads can only get better. If it works people will spend money on it. Our challenge is to make advertising work online. Are we spending enough time and energy on this problem or are we spending more time worrying about how journalist’s jobs are changing?]

Dominic Feltham

There’s a whole business in optimising sites for subscriptions

Andrew Langhoff

Don’t forget the customer service and related issues [if you’re planning on charging for content]. Charging for content is a complex business

Bill Murray

You have to add value to the consumption of content. The experience and functionality is important.

Simon Francis

Look for “big content ideas” that work across different media

Idea leadership not idea ownership

The holy grail is loyalty beyond reason

David Montgomery

Editors-in-chief should be replaced by content directors. [Yes, but many sites are already doing this – this is the model MSN uses for instance – and it’s not enough to ensure profitability and save local media. There’s still a huge issue with funding the content through advertising, whether search, display or classified. Incidentally, the likes of eBay and Autotrader have all but destroyed local media’s business model. What’s to be done about that?]

We pay more for coffee than we do for content [The implication is that content is more important to us than coffee so we’ll pay more for it. £2.00 for a latte or a sports report. Is content more valuable than coffee? Not so sure everyone will feel the same way.]

The title of this blog post is intentionally wordy. I used online content providers instead of journalists to emphasise that online is the single biggest threat and opportunity to all content providers, whether the provider is a large content organisation like News Corp, Time Warner or individual bloggers or journalists.

Content production is an industry that can’t control the consumption of what it produces. You make toasters, you sell them at a price you (partly) determine. You produce content, and that’s where it starts getting complicated.

The openness of the Internet, the paid-for debate, actually the issue of content producers not making enough money, means that content producers are struggling to show the worth of content and there isn’t agreement over what the best measurements of content consumption are or what we should be aiming for (loyalty, audience size etc).

Should I have used effective and popular and good? Each is an inexact and loaded word and much bandied about. Whichever of the three we want (or how many of the three), will effect how we measure what we do.

In the good-old days it was easier. People bought cinema tickets, casette and video tapes, vinyl, newspapers. Good journalists (sometimes) became popular and (often) effectively sold newspapers.

But now that content is being distributed online and shared rather than paid for, measuring success has become more difficult and more imperative.

The Mirror has made public that it’s going after engagement rather than audience size (this links to an interesting blog post on their strategy by Roy Greenslade). Sounds like a good idea. An engaged audience sounds like a more valuable one. But it’s not necessarily the case and what do we mean by “engaged” anyway?

Below I set out what are probably the most popular measurements of content consumption and success in encouraging it and try and point out some of their good sides and not so good sides.

PVs: Nice to have lots of PVs but they cost money to serve. How many pages carry ads and how much are these ads sold for?

Share: So you have 5% of the online audience? How long are they staying, what are they spending? What is your share of advertising spend? If it’s 4% you have a problem. 6% and you’re doing great.

UUs: This measure values a user who comes in once and never returns as highly as a user who returns 17 times a month. I know which I’d prefer to have (in some cases). Would you prefer 1m users in a month who never return or 100,000 who return 10 times each? But for some sites a pure user play can be effective. Much display and contextual advertising (think the finance market) is tied to a CPA no matter how it is sold. The more users you get the more clicks the ads are likely to get and so the more advertisers will spend. Possibly. Of course one user seeing one ad is less likely to click that ad than one user seeing ten ads – another argument for loyalty over audience acquisition. Where one advertiser dominates a site or section (a sponsorship for example) then user acquisition is important but where ad placements are in demand then loyalty (combined with a large audience) is more important.

PVs/UU: A measure of loyalty, but doesn’t measure what kind of users (once-off or regular) they are or what kind of pages they consume (messageboard PVs cost rather than make money) or what their activity is (are they just coming in to a valuable page to do one thing like check a stock quote and not getting involved with anything on the rest of the page? Can be artificially inflated by using photo-galleries or inserting an auto-refresh. Not many content sites do auto-refreshes fortunately. You only really see it on sports scoreboards.

Time online: Ads should really be linked to time rather than page views, that way a user spending a long time on a page can be shown several adverts. Conversely, a user consuming many pages in a short space of time can be shown fewer adverts if it’s believed a longer impression time increases clicks. Spending longer on a site does not always equate to loyalty (perhaps many once-off users just can’t find what they want) and doesn’t mean that valuable content is being consumed (is watching a video for 7 minutes more valuable to the producer than a user consuming 2 articles in 5 minutes?)

Bounce rate: people bounce when they leave after the initial page view. A useful measure of engagement but needs to be understood over time. Again, does not (cannot) measure the relative worth of pages.

Visits and return frequency: While a user who returns every day sounds like a very valuable user indeed, I refer again to the stock quote example. A reader comes to the site Monday to Friday, checks the price of the FTSE 100 and leaves. He’s got so used to seeing the chart on the page that he doesn’t look around and doesn’t engage with anything else on the page, has a great user experience but is costing the producer money (unless of course he has such a great user experience that he recommends the site to others). This brings to mind how shops regularly change their displays. Many shoppers have things they buy regularly and come to know where they are in the store. They go straight to the items and then to the checkout and do not look at what else is available. That’s why displays are changed, annoying as it is to those of us who prefer not having to spend time in shops looking for the new place the muesli is hidden.

Subscribers: The number and rate is clearly an easily understandable and quantifiable metric. But there are other factors: are ads served on subscription pages and if not how much revenue is being lost by not selling a loyal audience. Do subscribers consume non-subscription content as well as subscription? What does your pay-wall cost to build and maintain?

ARPU: Perhaps the only measure that really makes sense. To those of us who care about making a profit, understanding the average revenue per user (and of course what our costs are), is crucial. All the other measurements are needed for a holistic view of the business and for strategy planning but for a overall picture of the health of our business the ARPU over time is all important.

Maybe it’s actually quite simple. Know what you want to achieve (it’s usually profit but not always) and the right measurement will follow.

Facebook Lite has been designed with users who have slow internet connections in mind. It’s stripped out a lot of the stuff you don’t use anyway and just gives you the basics – writing on walls, uploading photos etc. There are no apps. This is really a very joyous thing – no apps. What is the point of a Facebook app these days anyway? When Facebook was new and bright and shiny everyone loved these things but like any game you get tired of it. You stop playing and go back to just talking to your friends and it seems like this is what Facebook Lite is catering for. People who just want the core communication experience will start using this version more and leave the pie-chucking to others. Facebook’s strengths have always been that it enables real connections between real people and this Lite version brings that to the fore.

Here’s the link to FB Lite: http://lite.facebook.com/

I’m lucky in that my company allows me to work from home every now and then. When I do though any productivity gains I might make because of no meetings, and fewer phonecalls and interruptions are partly offset by the slower speed of my home broadband connection and by the frequent loss of service I have to endure. I seem to be on a particularly flaky connection and regularly get chucked off the network by one or both of Orange and BT. What do I lose in terms of productivity? Probably no more than 5% but if I had to work from home more regularly that would start to add up. The quality and speed of home broadband connections in the UK is, I dare say, probably not the best it could be and probably holding back regular home workers. Some people still don’t have any broadband at all.

Still, it’s not as bad as in South Africa, where this week it was proved that a carrier pigeon is faster than that country’s broadband.