Bradley Howard's Blog

Views of digital media, innovation, loyalty and business in the real world

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Happy birthday post

Jan 23, 2012 at 3:44pm
 

Churchill1
It’s embarrassing when you forget a birthday, and it’s double embarrassing when you forget your own. On 16 January this blog turned two years’ old.

As has become custom - well, I did it last year so I'll do it again, here are some of the traffic stats.

Before I begin, thank you and all the visitors who have been coming to the site. 

This is a comparison between the year up to 17 January 2010 and 2011:

    18 Jan 2011 to  
17 Jan 2012  		   18 Jan 2010 to  
17 Jan 2011  
Posts

100

133
Visitors

5,065

2,556
Page Views  

7,675

3,723

So, whilst I apologise for not writing as many posts as last year, the ones I did write seem to be more interesting!

These figures don't include the RSS feed readers or search engines which keep crawling the site.

I said last year that my aims for 2011/2 were to double the traffic and have more people commenting. The table above shows the first objective was achieved. As for the number of comments, this is measure using the blog tool (Posterous).

My aims for next year is to keep growing the traffic by the same amount - here’s to over 7,500 visitors in the next year.

Once again, if you have any recommendations or articles you'd like to see, please let me know by adding a comment below or contacting me directly. As soon as I get requests I usually act upon them within a couple of days.


 
tags:
analytics, stats,
0 Comments

A look at New York Times digital revenues

Oct 25, 2011 at 12:33pm
 

Capture
The New York Times has announced some details of it's online premium subscription (i.e. cash payment) model.

Full details

Digital

Digital businesses include NYTimes.com, BostonGlobe.com, Boston.com, About.com, other Company Web sites and related digital products. In the third quarter of 2011, total digital advertising revenues decreased 4.5 percent to $74.8 million from $78.3 million. Digital advertising revenues at the News Media Group increased 6.2 percent to $50.3 million from $47.4 million due to growth in retail and national display advertising. Digital advertising revenues as a percentage of total Company advertising revenues were 28.6 percent for the third quarter of 2011 compared with 27.3 percent in the third quarter of 2010.

In the first nine months of 2011, the Company's total digital advertising revenues increased 0.9 percent to $242.9 million from $240.7 million. Digital advertising revenues at the News Media Group increased 12.2 percent to $162.4 million from $144.7 million. Digital advertising revenues as a percentage of total Company advertising revenues were 28.2 percent for the first nine months of 2011 compared with 26.3 percent in the first nine months of 2010.

Paid digital subscribers to The Times digital subscription packages, e-readers and replica editions totaled approximately 324,000 as of the end of the third quarter of 2011. In addition to these paid digital subscribers, as of the end of the third quarter of 2011, The Times had more than 100,000 highly engaged users sponsored by Ford Motor Company's luxury brand, Lincoln, who have free access to NYTimes.com and smartphone apps until the end of the year, and approximately 800,000 home-delivery subscribers with linked digital accounts, who receive free digital access. In total, The Times had paid and sponsored relationships with over 1.2 million digital users as of the end of the third quarter of 2011.

Source: The New York Times Company

My interpretation

  • In the last quarter, there were 1.2 million registered users, of whom 324,000 paid something, and 100,000 were paid for by Ford (a great subscription model as long as there are no catches for either party) and 800,000 were covered by their print subscription. In other words, they have a churn of about 25%.
  • The site has 45 million unique visitors per month as of January 2011 - it's interesting that they use comScore to quote that 45 million. ComScore use an estimated data model, as opposed to NYT using their own actual data.
  • Anyway, 45 million unique users and 324,000 have paid something - that's a conversion rate of less than one percent, however paid for content is still very much in its infancy.
  • Those 45 million users probably don't include Smartphone users or e-readers (hats off to ComScore if that can get that data, however I suspect they can't).
  • Doing some extremely rough sums, subscriptions are 99 cents for the first 4 weeks and then $3.75 per week thereafter. Let's ignore the special offer price and let's assume Ford pay a full $3.75 per user. Ignoring the print subscribers who get the digital edition for free, that's a total revenue of $1.59 million per week. Let's assume NYT earned this revenue throughout the entire quarter (12 weeks), that's a total of $19 million for the quarter.
  • Digital advertising across the group (and this includes a number of other websites and newspapers) generated $74.8 million.

Lessons to take away from this quarterly statement

  • The premium digital content model still has a way to go - advertising still generated four times the revenue as subscribers.
  • 'Wholesale' or 'sponsored' user bases are key drivers for the number of paid for subscribers - Ford pay for 100,000 users and NYT have 324,000 paying individual subscribers. Think of the effort that goes into the Ford deal compared to the direct to consumer sales effort.

 
tags:
analytics, business, content, digital media, ecommerce, economy, freemium, news, sponsorship, subscription content,
1 Comment

TV audience figures - the fury continues

Sep 6, 2011 at 1:17pm
 

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My anger with TV audience figures has just been further inflamed. I've just read that Red or Black lost 1.8 million TV viewers last night. It's big news in the media news at the moment.

1.8 million TV viewers. This is calculated from BARB, which distribute TV set top boxes which analyse TV usage in a few homes around the country. These figures are then extrapolated to the UK population - each set top box represents 5,000 viewers.

So 1.8 million fewer viewers is actually 360 people. 360 people didn't want a TV programme last night, which has commercial repercussions across the industry.

I still can't fathom how such an antiquated system is used to define the UK's £9bn television industry (that figure is from 2005).

I propose that all set top boxes - Virgin, Sky, BT Vision, etc. are required to send viewing stats back to a central location, probably Ofcom and actual figures are used, not extrapolated figures. We could go one step further and require all digital TVs to send usage stats back to Ofcom too.

It is unthinkable that a commercial website operation would not implement an analytics provider as a measuring tool - and have to pay for it themself. Quite how this happens in the TV industry is very strange.

Photo courtesy of Stefan on Flickr


 
tags:
TV, analytics, business, television,
2 Comments

The best starters guide to online marketing

Jun 16, 2011 at 11:08am
 

If you're looking for a "How to" guide to online or digital marketing, I recommend the following graphic (care of Unbounce). I've sent this to many people by email and Twitter as the best starting point for any online marketing campaign. It doesn't necessarily need a large advertising budget behind it - it just needs some time. 

There's so much information in the graphic that I've tried printing it on several A3 sheets but it didn't look particularly great. My brother-in-law (thanks to PhotoPaperDirect) has managed to print it as a 6 foot long print on a screen printer however there resolution isn't good enough to remain clear (it's OK, but not brilliant).

The Noob Guide to Online Marketing - Infographic
Unbounce – The DIY Landing Page Platform


 
tags:
User Generated Content, advertising, analytics, content, digital media, email, marketing, search, seo, social media,
0 Comments

Why your web traffic is going to increase this summer

Jun 15, 2011 at 1:24pm
 

The next version of the Google Chrome browser will help speed up users' web experiences by preloading the first result in the background.

If you are able to construct good Google search terms and often find you click on the first result, the new experience is going to save you several seconds per result.

If you manage a website which usually appears as the first result on Google searches, your traffic is about to substantially increase, because each of those pre-fetches is going to register a visit and a page impression. Google will offset this by offering a plugin to Google Analytics - great if you use Google, and it will be interesting to see how the other analytics providers will handle this.


 
tags:
Google Chrome, analytics, google, usability, web traffic,
0 Comments

Personalised content getting confused

Apr 13, 2011 at 10:59am
 

At Endava we strongly believe the future of consumer websites is what we call 'B21' - a highly personalised web experience.

Our product stack and all web technologies are now based around the efficiency of getting data into our clients' systems, analysing it and finding the 'insight', and serving relevant content.

When I logged into Tesco.com this evening, the personalised recommendations for the house were rather amusing - somewhat 'religiously confused' - wondering whether to wish us a Happy Passover or a Happy Easter!

Tesco


 
tags:
B21, Tesco, analytics, content, data, insight, personalisation,
0 Comments

TV audiences v Web traffic part 2

Feb 16, 2011 at 9:34am
 

I've always had a bit of a bee in my bonnet when it comes to BARB figures. Just the concept of extrapolating from 5,000 homes to an estimated audience of 26 million in 2011 starts gets me frustrated.

Two recent articles provide further evidence in my favour.

The first article was in an excellent interview with Keith Weed, the CMO of Unilever. In the interview he provides an answer to the ROI (Return On Investment) question of social media:

The measurement of ROI in this area is a big issue for us. We have different ways of measurement, some of which are more experimental than others. The good news is that I have enough evidence that says most of the time we can prove better ROI online than in TV. It is much more measurable.

So Unilever is the second largest spender on TV in the World (a statistic he mentions in the interview), yet he's happy putting his faith in ancient, unscientific BARB figures, but when it comes to digital, Unilever want it to be scientific to the n'th degree.

There's another way to interpret his answer though - I estimate that BARB figures are hugely inflated because of the extrapolation that was perhaps sufficient with 4 or 5 TV channels, but nowadays as useless as a chocolate teapot in the age oif hundreds of TV, IPTV and PVRs such as Sky+. ROI from a huge TV ad spend is then going to be lower, because the TV ad is at an inflated cost, and the returns (e.g. increased revenue) are much more measurable by the brand.

So no wonder that Mr Weed is experiencing an increase in ROI from social media and digital in particular.

The second article I read was from Cadbury, who can now measure their ROI on digital so precisely that they find a return of 3 to 1 for each pound spent in the new world (you need an NMA subscription for that original article, or click here for a copy of the article). Again, I think it's because the measurement tools available on the web are so superior to TV measurement.

URLs for this article:


 
tags:
ROI, TV, analytics, brands, business, digital media, social media, stats,
1 Comment

Happy Birthday post

Jan 16, 2011 at 10:47am
 

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This blog has now been going for a year, so I thought I'd share some of the readership statistics with you.

Between 18 January 2010 and 17 January 2011, there have been:

  • 133 posts 
  • 2,556 visitors come along
  • 3,723 page views on the site

In terms of geography, it pretty much matches where we have current and former colleagues, clients, suppliers and friends:

Geography
It's interesting to note that colleagues in Romania and Moldova spend the longest reading articles whereas colleagues in the US are either put off straight away, or read very quickly (quicker than the UK)!

The most popular article of the year was a review on Yammer where 300 people read the review - well above the daily average. Talking of the daily average, this has been steadily growing from nothing at the start of the blog to a steady 20-30 visits a day now.

These figures don't include the RSS feed readers or search engines which keep crawling the site.

A huge thank you to everyone who reads the blog (that includes you!).

My aims for 2011/2 are to double the traffic and have more people commenting. If you have any recommendations or articles you'd like to see, please let me know by adding a comment below or contacting me directly.


 
tags:
analytics, blog comment, blogging, web traffic,
0 Comments

To build an App or not to be build an App

Jan 10, 2011 at 8:16am
 

App_store1

We have a customer at Endava who is at the innovative end of the spectrum. I wouldn't describe them at 'bleeding edge', however they are willing to take some risks by prototyping new technologies and if the ideas succeed, a more rubust version will be built.

Last year they produced a number of prototypes for an annual event - a YouTube channel, the start of a social media implementation, and an iPhone app.

The iPhone app was more successful than a most expected, for a very simple reason. The web analytics from the website showed a low number of users were browsing their main website using an iPhone. So there was little evidence that an iPhone app would work.

However, as soon as the iPhone app was launched, it was downloaded in the tens of thousands within a week. The following year, a new version was released and downloaded 250,000 times in the same period.

What we're learnt from this experience is that iPhone apps are another route to market. They exist in parallel to your website rather than a promotional element of it. For this client, the app was hardly promoted on the main website.

It's ever been quicker or cheaper to produce prototypes such as the ones listed above as long as the core infrastructure is in place - specifically APIs and a decent Content Management System. 10 years ago, these types of prototypes would cost 10 times as much for equivalent first versions (a WAP site, a video portal and as for social media - it hardly existed!).

So the answer to the question in the title - try it.


 
tags:
YouTube, analytics, iPhone, social media, website production,
0 Comments

Shouting at the clouds

Aug 31, 2010 at 2:28pm
 

Cloud

As a Digital Media agency, we are regularly being asked our view on whether we use cloud services from Google Analytics to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure full hosting.

My answer at this point in time is really simple we don't use them because if these services go wrong, we (and our customers) have no one to pick up the phone and shout at.

For example, we generally use Omniture (Adobe) for site analytics rather than Google Analytics. I know the name and mobile phone number of our Omniture account manager. I guess that just knowing who to contact gives a level of reassurance.

One of our partners uses one of the large cloud services for it’s main business operations. It makes sense to them – they need to simulate hundreds of computers during tests, for short periods of time. Trying to do that from a standard Internet connection in the office is fraught with problems, and it’s easier and cheaper to rely on the cloud’s infrastructure. Except recently they have been experiencing problem after problem in that cloud’s environment, and their entire business is dependent on that specific cloud provider.

When you experience an outage on Azure or Amazon, who can you call? How can you offer an SLA to end clients when you can’t contact your infrastructure provider?

There are companies who have invested in setting up their own ‘cloud’ environments (we are one of them), with proven support systems in place, and the real USP… a manned 24x7 helpdesk complete with an Account Manager.


 
tags:
Amazon, Endava, IT, Microsoft, analytics, business, cloud, digital media,
0 Comments
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Bradley Howard

Bradley Howard

Head of Digital Media at Endava, although all the views in this blog are purely mine and not necessarily those of Endava.

 

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