Disclaimer: For examples in this post, I use Visual Avenue’s show, Craving Confidence, and NBC’s Chuck. This is not meant to be a promotional post.
One of the common themes behind internet content is audience measurement — as in content producers and publishers can determine who’s viewing your content and the visibility of that content. However, even in the digital world, that number is in-correct, and often times, far from the truth.
Digital Media Example – Craving Confidence.
- Visual Avenue produces Craving Confidence, which is a 8 month old show which spans the topic of confidence — accompanied by text based content. According to Podcast Alley, which lists thousands of podcasts, Craving Confidence is ranked in the top 4,000. However, when you visit iTunes, there’s no way we’d know what the placing is.
- Pageviews are also drastically inconsistent across different measurement platforms. Visual Avenue uses Google Analytics and a server based analytics program, AWStats. There is a significant difference. Who do we trust when we want to pitch the show to advertisers? See below:
- A majority of our traffic comes from iTunes (50%). However, Google Analytics does not capture that information. Again — who’s right?
- Lastly, we syndicate via YouTube, Viddler, Vimeo, in addition to our primary player, Blip.TV.
- While we can combine all those numbers and come up with a definitive number, that still won’t give us a definitive number, because the also has hundreds of members on Facebook.
- Just based on the above statistics, it’s clear that there’s a discrepancy of what the show should report.
Traditional Media Example – Chuck.
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- Chuck is in it’s sophomore season on NBC, but it’s on the bubble for Season 3.
- It’s numbers are so-so, but not terrible.
- However, the fan and critic support for the show is tremendous. Example: 16 members of the cast and crew were on a single fan podcast. How many times has that happened in the past? And, these are lead characters and Executive Producers.
- Apart from Nielsen, DVR, iTunes, and Hulu numbers, there are tons of forums discussing forums. Should the network count fan forum pageviews (estimates), behind-the-scenes content, etc.?
The above highlights just some of the issues of digital measurement. It has not be perfected, and is unlikely that this will be perfected. TV is not going away, but digital content distribution has to be measured in one format that can consistenly be presented to advertisers and marketers.
