Kantar Media: “Honey, we shrunk the audience!”
In our latest research focus piece, Kantar Media explains why news sites that charge for content need audience metrics that go beyond reach…
Investors at a recent DMGT briefing were told by Martin Clarke, publisher of Mail Digital, that “readers will not pay to consume general news on the web”. Meanwhile, News International is thought to expect a 90% fall in traffic once the new Times and Sunday Times websites slide behind the paywall in June (and last week suspended the public reporting of ABCe web traffic for its sites).
These prognoses are consistent with a number of published consumer research studies, including Kantar Media’s futurePROOF study, which indicated widespread resistance to the notion of paying a subscription to access something that they are used to getting for nothing. James Harding, editor of The Times, appears unperturbed and has dismissed the site users that timesonline.co.uk will lose as “passing traffic…They are not regular readers. They are more like window shoppers.”
The implication is that yes, the audience will shrink, but those who remain will be the pick of the bunch. In what sense, though? No doubt that those who sign up for subscription access to the times.co.uk in the first few months will be the most loyal readers, but what’s the value of reader loyalty to an advertiser? The need to maximise advertising revenue, alongside subscription revenues, won’t recede as the paywalls emerge.
Newspaper publishers who have suffered the steady decline of print audiences over the past decade or more know that putting a value on the audience is not a new imperative. Kantar Media has worked with a number of them to help them do just that. What’s new is the now urgent need to do the same for their digital audiences, which until now have been sold primarily on reach. News International would appear to recognise this, having stated that it is “working with ABCe to help evolve metrics related to engagement as the business models evolve”.
Rules of Engagement
At Kantar Media, we’ve been lucky to work with several of our clients to help them in their quest to understand and measure audience engagement, both online and offline. That experience has informed a clear vision of what ‘Engagement’ (an oft-maligned, misused or misrepresented concept) should encompass in order to be relevant and useful. In the spirit of this week’s big democratic event, here’s our five-point manifesto for developing digital audience engagement metrics that really count:
1. Audience engagement is multi-faceted.
It can be summarised into one, high-level measure, but to be relevant and useful that summary measure needs to be derived from a balance of both behavioural and attitudinal components.
2. Qualify the intensity of user interaction with the site.
The amount of time spent on the site by individual users is a good place to start, but it’s misleading in isolation. We also need to consider frequency, the number of sessions and the breadth of the content consumed. Are users skimming the surface across a number of different content areas or immersing themselves more deeply in the content?
3. Mind-set is a key differentiator.
Can you prove that the content mix engenders not just a high level of engagement with the content itself, but a mind-set that is receptive to advertising communications? The attitudinal dimensions that used to qualify the mindset of the users should be customised to reflect the editorial and brand values alongside the more universal dimensions such as trust, credibility and relevance.
4. Audience engagement is meaningless without outcomes.
This is where you can get real advantage from engagement metrics. Defeat the “so what?” refuseniks by demonstrating compelling links between user engagement and propensity to take action (both online and offline) following exposure to content or advertising. The action taken could include the steps along the way to making a purchase or the user exerting their word of mouth influence on others.
5. Integrate data sources to harness the power of audience engagement.
It will be clear from the points above that our vision of Engagement involves linking behavioural site analytics data with attitudinal survey data. Kantar Media does this at the individual user level with our Connect tool to provide single source, holistic engagement measurement. The data can then be integrated with customer databases to increase its power even further.