The Metrics of Media — Why 1 Billion Is The New Million
A little over ten years ago I started working for The Huffington Post. We had created a product with massive loyalty — a homepage that was refreshed by loyalists like crazy. We were close to what we thought might be 3 million unique visitors a month and 30 million page views. Digg was “huge”, and there were pictures of burnt servers that reflected the Digg-effect of a big home page link on Digg killing web servers with a deluge of traffic.
Remember Digg? Circa 2009, from Mashable.
Google Analytics didn’t exist yet, and the closest thing you could get was SiteHit or SiteMeter. There was no Real Time GA or ChartBeat, and so we started to build our own ways of understanding popularity. We built a click meter into the front page and section pages, and we built page-view counters that sorted where traffic was coming from and we put this together into stats editors could see per story.
The gold standard measure of your audience was Comscore, and until you hit 1M unique visitors as measured by Comscore, you couldn’t monetize at all. Ken Lerer had a little print out of from Sarah Bernard, the GM on the page saying “we got paid!” and it showed Google’s ad sense sending us a check for a little under $10.
When we hit that 1 million unique visitors on Comscore, it was a big deal — we weren’t a little blog anymore; we were the biggest blog and we were turning into a real media company that could stand toe-to-toe with the giants of the time like Washington Post andThe New York Times. With 1 million uniques we could go to brands and command premium ad revenue, and the brands started to come to us. One million was a really big number then, and while sales really didn’t fully take off until the great Greg Coleman (now President of BuzzFeed) came in and taught us how to define what made our audience unique and build an incredible sales team. But none of that was possible until one million uniques.
Now, one million unique visitors is a tiny number. ‘Total reach’ is the new ‘unique visitors’ — and reaching 1 Million people today is the equivalent of 10,000 unique visitors in 2005.
The new milestone media companies need to meet is now one billion in reach.
This reach number is calculated as reported by all the social giants combined for your property. How many people have viewed the content you created? One billion is big enough to have the impact that one million uniques used to. Reaching the one billion mark is how you rise above the noise and get noticed by the biggest brand marketers. That visibility then brings you premium dollars. When you reach that scale, you start seeing your content being scrolled on airplanes and in line at coffee shops.
Media companies that are still reporting to their management team, board and investors around page views and unique visitors will be falling apart at the seams. Traffic that used to come from the great firehoses and floodgates of Google are now a small steady stream. From 2012 to the summer of 2016, Facebook became the great new source of traffic to the open web. While we were working at RebelMouse on helping companies understand how to grow their social traffic and how to create social products, we were largely a vitamin pill.
Facebook’s strategy shifted, as it should, with user behavior. In 2010, Facebook had a very small team working on mobile, and they had no native teams and apps but instead were using a wrapper around a web view. Facebook was slow on phones, and people were very happy to click out of it to find stories on websites. By 2012, Facebook’s shift to become a native mobile powerhouse was successful and was at scale. Every new phone included a super fast Facebook app, and the ability for Facebook to cache locally on each device and cache locally at the nearest node was sophisticated.
The rise of Facebook mobile-only users. From TechCrunch.
As the next years progressed, we all started to expect the type of speed inside of Facebook. By 2015, we were all clearly flinching before clicking a link out to the open web. Facebook follows user behavior like no other company I know, and two key initiatives were started — video and instant articles. We are proud to be an official partner to Facebook on Instant Articles at RebelMouse because it represents the future of how people will consume media.
In the summer of 2015, we began building out Rebel Discovery to help companies understand their social ecosystem, how sharing worked on Facebook and which big social accounts they need to create relationships with. By June of 2016, The Dodo, always the most sophisticated and advanced users of our software, had become the 5th largest publisher on Facebook. Every writer and editor and video producer understand their social ecosystem, and they have become the center of the universe of animals on the internet.
Facebook shifted its algos in the early summer of 2016, and in what feels like a blink, the flood doors of traffic to websites on the web has slowed to look like small streams of Google traffic. Media companies that are running Facebook pages which do nothing but link to their own websites are seeing drastic double-digit declines which are not going to stop declining. It is hard to realize, but being social is about more than talking constantly about yourself.
I visited Alaska this summer, where the memories of the 1964 earthquake were everywhere. A space of nearly the size of Texas moved 7 feet. The tsunami wave that it created made it from Anchorage to San Francisco in 3 hours. It takes 4 hours to do that on a plane. This is roughly what media is going through today. Media is undergoing a change so big it will impact nearly everybody working on the internet in the way that earthquake impacted nearly everyone living in Alaska. And it will happen so fast, that existing technologies will look slow.
Calculated time travel for tsunami caused by 1964 Alaska earthquake, fromWikipedia.
It’s also a time of great opportunity. The Dodo has risen to be three times as big as the Huffington Post in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost. The winners in landscape changes get to rise ranks at speeds that were completely impossible ten years ago and would have been laughed at 20 years ago.
At RebelMouse we’ve built a global team that passes the baton from time zone to time zone, with brilliant individuals in 26 countries all overcoming their cultural context to be open, creative and fast. This new way of working is the new way of making the new metrics possible. Everything has to change to adapt.
Media companies need to shift how they report to their board, how they meet in their management teams and how their entire staff and technologies are put together. The costs of the companies, the percentage of writers to video teams, the concepts of loyalty and community — everything is not going to change in the future. It has changed already, about three months ago when we started summer.
Paul Berry is the Founder + CEO of RebelMouse. Contact him here.
