Over the past years, I have written many articles about new concepts for advanced analytics. Specifically, I have been talking about subscriber analytics, editorial analytics, learning analytics, and scored analytics. It is fascinating to see how many publishers are now starting to use these concepts to redefine how they think about analytics.
For instance, Norwegian publishers Schibsted have been using learning analytics and a mini form of machine learning to improve subscription rates. The Wall Street Journal is now looking at 60 different signals to create a dynamic paywall that adjusts to each person's consumption pattern. The Financial Times has come up with an RFV score (Recency, Frequency, and Volume) that they use to segment their audience.
These are all truly fascinating to learn about, but there is a slight problem in that all of these examples are based on what very large publishers are doing with an extensive level of data across a large audience.
What if you are not a large publisher with billions in annual revenue? What if you are just a small niche vertical, a single magazine, an independent publisher, or just a small local newspaper?
What can you do then? Do you even have enough data to do anything?
Well, that's what we are going to talk about in this 23-page Plus report.
You need metrics more than ever
Before we go into the details, we need to take a step back and realize why rethinking the way we work with analytics is suddenly so important.
In the old days of media, analytics was never really important.
Take something like a local newspaper. In the old days, whenever you sold advertising, there was no way for you to offer anything specific. At the most, you could say that the ad could be placed in different parts of the newspaper. The ad space on the front page or on one of the early pages was sold for more than those in the back of the newspaper, but there was no targeting and no metrics.
On top of this, the way people consumed a local newspaper was always as a package. People would sit down with the newspaper as a whole and start to flip through it. So, again, there was no metric for anything specific. You had a circulation and that was it.