
Here are the best articles that I’ve read during the last week:
Here are the best articles that I’ve read during the last week:
Following the annual tradition on this site for the last post of the year, here is a list of my personal favourites from the last twelve months. Continue reading My Favourite Gadgets, Books, Apps and Awards in 2014
Many organisations are finding themselves asking “What is Digital?” It’s a difficult question which sounds easy at first. After all, isn’t everything that we do today that involves electronics, digital in some shape or form?
If an organisation has a CTO (Chief Technology Officer), why does it also need a CDO (Chief Digital Officer)? If an organisation already has an IT department, why does it need a digital one too?
So what is digital?
To me, digital is a mindset. In the 1990’s we’d have called it a paradigm. It’s all about thinking slightly differently to classic IT. Continue reading What is Digital?
If you use Google Analytics to measure the number of visitors to your website, you will love the new Google Chrome toolbar add-on. And if you have multiple sites, it will make your job even easier.
The Chrome Extension sits quietly while you browse, until you visit a site of which you have access to the analytics. At this point, a dashboard at the top of the browser window shows various page stats. You can also minimise these stats to just display real-time information for each page.
Whilst doing some research at work on innovation within the Publishing industry, a colleague of mine found a leaked report from the New York Times from March this year (the full article is at the end of this page).
At 94 pages, it’s a must-read for anyone within Publishing. I took 11 key points from the document:
The Olympics is like London buses – you don’t see anything about it for a while, and suddenly you get several opportunities at the same time.
On Monday I was very fortunate to meet with Alex Balfour, who was the Head of New Media at London 2012. If you haven’t seen Alex’s summary of London 2012 on slideshare yet, stop reading this and take a read straight away.
So I saw Alex on Monday, who for a man who has had one of the most stressful jobs in Digital Media for the last three years, didn’t look any worse for it (no grey hair or hair loss!); and this evening I was invited to an event hosted by Simon La Fosse where the guest speaker was Gerry Pennell, the CIO of London 2012.
Gerry spoke for around thirty minutes, which flew by quickly, and then there were literally dozens, dozens of questions from the audience. The thing that struck me was how each member of the audience was so polite and started off by congratulating Gerry and his team on such a successful event. This was refreshing because the IT community doesn’t congratulate one another – IT has such a high expectation that if it works, well, it’s expected to, and anything less is something to complain about.
Gerry described how important digital was such a key component of delivering the Games. Actually, he wanted to stick to ‘just’ the huge undertaking of delivering a live events service, but his presentation kept coming back to digital consumers. All wonderfully consumer focussed.
Some of the other key points he covered:
Someone in the audience asked about the huge amount of data that LOCOG had collected during the summer, and whether there was a Big Data opportunity. Gerry answered that the team was disbanded straight after the Paralympics, so there wasn’t much of an opportunity or business desire (because the business was dismantled as well!)
We are seeing a world where the value of content is continually diminishing – there are so many sources of content that it’s easy to move to someone who’s giving it away for free as soon as one source starts charging. Technology also makes it easy to bypass traditional content funding models – such as the ability to fast forward during adverts on pre-recorded TV programmes.
Sport will continually increasing in value though. By its nature, it’s time sensitive, so it’s usually watched live. This makes the advertising much more valuable – for instance, think about the infamous Super Bowl ads.
This in turn makes the content more valuable – and one of the key reasons why the English Premiership’s rights rose 71% this year to over a billion pounds per season.
Sport – it’s only a game. Really???
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.
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
Lessons to take away from this quarterly statement
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
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).