Good Monday morning, everyone! Josh Sternberg, Adweek's media and tech editor, here.
At our sold-out Challenger Brand event last week in New York City, I interviewed Time’s president Keith Grossman on stage and he said something that I haven’t been able to shake.
“Stop chasing traffic and start focusing on engagement,” he said.
It’s a simple, yet problematic phrase. It’s crazy to me that traffic is our industry’s standard measure of success. (The words of an old cynical editor of mine echo in my brain: "A standard is just a lie an industry agrees upon.")
The rush to scale and the thinking that quantity means quality, has, if one chooses to pay attention, been a systemic digital media flaw; a prime example of just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
And it’s something we cannot seem to overcome. Look at every media company that has folded or laid off scores of staffers because their traffic numbers dropped (usually because Facebook or Google changed an algorithm).
But what’s the alternative? How can a digital media company measure success if not attributable to how many people clicked on a page?
There is, however, a quiet revolution happening trying to change what we consider success, and that lies with that squishy term “engagement.”
Talking to us in January, Tony Haile, the CEO of Scroll, but also former CEO of Chartbeat, said, “Having spent seven years trying to find a better metric for the internet, I realized it’s the least shifty metric and corresponds nicely with video time and everything else,” Haile said.
And at our Challenger Brand summit, I spoke with several execs across a variety of agencies and direct-to-consumer brands who said they want to evaluate a media buy around some form of engagement, whatever that may be.
The shift is happening, as media companies look at other aspects of their business to entice advertisers. But perhaps we'll see more non-advertising models, which won't have to be predicated on web traffic. Take memberships.
Sources at big-titled publications have told me recently that they've been sending up test balloons for premium memberships. It's not unheard of. Quartz, for example, generated more than $1 million in memberships off of 12,000 members last year.
It will be interesting to see if buyers will agree to the shift or keep the status quo: whatever can be fit into a spreadsheet. Non-traffic-based sponsorships (say, in events) can also be a more appropriate way to get a message in front of a publisher's audience. And you can measure how many people come to an event, scale be damned.
Have ideas for consistent measurements, drop me a line. In the meantime, have a great week and please wash your hands with soap.
