by Matt Shanahan on April 11, 2012 in Advertising, ARPU, Audience Development, Behavioral Analytics, Digital Revenue Optimization, Loyalty, Revenue Optimization
Through 2015, much of the B2B media revenue growth forecasted by Veronis Suhler Stevenson shows a substantial portion will come from events — both live and virtual. Most notably, over 70% of clients are increasing investment in geographical events that can be replicated in multiple locations – geo-cloning, as one client called it. And because events require longer lead times, extensive production and marketing investment, optimizing event revenue becomes dependent on trade-offs – specifically, trade-offs between the revenue potential of various events. So how do you measure revenue potential of an event? Event revenue mainly comes from two sources: vendors and attendees. In the case of vendors, their revenue directly correlates to the number of attendees to which they gain [...]
by Matt Shanahan on February 3, 2012 in Advertising, Audience Development
The anonymous audience is a revenue anchor that pulls down business performance for media publishers. A behavioral analysis of fly-by visitors highlights just how much of a drag they are on the revenue model. A robust revenue model creates multiple streams of revenue from an audience member. The revenue potential of an audience member is defined by both the engagement behavior with media (i.e., advertising revenue) and the purchase behavior for events, daily deals, commerce, or subscriptions (i.e., direct revenue). To quantify the revenue drag of the anonymous audience, Scout Research analyzed the revenue potential of an anonymous visitor compared to a registered visitor at every level of loyalty (i.e., fly-bys, occasionals, regulars, and fans). The infographic to the right [...]
by Matt Shanahan on November 7, 2011 in Advertising, Audience Development, Behavioral Analytics
Building on our original findings in 2010 about audience loyalty, scout® research has been looking into what creates loyalty. Understanding the nature of loyalty, would obviously allow a publisher to nurture and grow the audience. For instance, is a fan a fan because she reads all the homepage articles? Or is she a fan because of a certain section of content? So what did we find out? Site-wide fans typically make up 20-30% of the visitors. Site-wide fans are the ones with a broad reading habit. Think of them as the cover-to-cover reader. In contrast when you analyze most fans’ behavior to figure out what they are a “fans of”, it is typical to find an individual fan has an [...]
by Matt Shanahan on March 11, 2011 in Attention Economics, Audience Development, Loyalty
Richard Tofel’s post this week about how digital news will be better when publishers move beyond SEO was an interesting op-ed, but most of the debate seemed philosophical as opposed to factual. Our advice to publishers: SEO is for audience development, not revenue (that could have been a softer title for this post). Here are the facts behind that recommendation. Fact: Loyal audience members do not use search as a means to engage with publishers. The striking difference between fans and fly-bys is the percentage of visits that are based on direct vs. search. Upwards of 95 percent of fly-by visits are generated from a search whereas upwards of 70 percent of fan visits are direct. Of the fan visits [...]
by Matt Shanahan on September 14, 2010 in Advertising, ARPU, Audience Development
Posted by: Matt Shanahan Drive-bys can be a majority or a minority of the audience depending on the publisher’s attitude towards SEO, social networking, and other traffic driving techniques. Understanding the weight and priority of drive-by ARPU versus ARPU of other audience segments can provide insight into a publishers strategy. So this post looks at the ARPU equation for drive-bys. For most media publishers, the audience can be broken up into four segments: fans, regulars, occasionals, and drive-bys. The qualification of an audience member into one of the four groups is based on an engagement metric that can vary between publishers but is usually time on site. The Scout Analytics definition for drive-by is that the individual’s time on site is not predictable during a [...]
by Matt Shanahan on April 16, 2010 in Audience Development, Behavioral Analytics
Posted by: Matt Shanahan Okay, I’ll admit it—I’m a bit of an information junkie. I’m constantly digging for new information about the things I care about—fact, figures, and interesting new perspectives. I like to find and leverage information. At least half of the information that I use day-to-day, I get from the Internet. And while I might process more information than the average person, I gather it in the standard way. Information gathering (i.e., visits) pretty much comes in two flavors—routine and ad hoc—each offering its own opportunities to the publisher. Routine visits are by definition, pattern-based. Routine visits involve specific topics and content on a regular basis. Routine visits might be what you read daily over your [...]
by Matt Shanahan on March 31, 2010 in Advertising, Audience Development, Loyalty
Posted by: Matt Shanahan In Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, the theme was how low demand products could generate substantial revenue by rethinking sales and distribution. The argument is that selling less quantity but more products a company yields as much as selling more quantity but fewer products. Does the long tail apply to digital publishing? If so, how? As the mantra goes, publishers sell audiences. In every website monitored by Scout Analytics, we find an audience defined by a long tail of visitors that looks like the graphic below. From this picture the long-tail rule may be focus on the short tail. In other words, selling more frequency from fewer visitors can yield as much as selling more visitors [...]
