If you didn't see HBO's The Wire when it was on, go rent the DVDs...now. Maybe the best show ever. If you are a fan, you know one of the overriding themes is that politics/positioning trumps reality every, single, time. The police department can never publish 'clean stats' on crime because everyone's agenda gets in the way.
When it comes to stats for web based properties (sites and software tools) you can almost never get a clean read on the metrics that matter for two reasons:
1. The 'third party' tools like Alexa, Compete, Quantcast are terrible. And believe me, I say this even when Compete and Alexa overstate CoveritLive's ranking and traffic. This is not a, "wah, wah...we're bigger than they say we are" kind of thing.
2. Companies then layer on the positioning by picking and promoting only the good news as well as fundamentally not understanding what metrics actually matter.
In the long run, I hope we continue to build our reputation on telling our users (and the media) only what matters and making sure it's accurate. I've seen enough evidence that this can win out in the end (though it can be frustrating listening to people not adhering to that standard).
Here is what matters to us, and should matter most to our users:
1. How many people clicked the 'watch now' button on your live event. We know requiring a 'click' eliminated around 50% of 'readers' that were just bots. Some of our users asked, "why did my reader stats drop off so much?". The incentive to leave that metric the old way was strong. We could tell you that 14,000 people read your live blog, but we know the real number was more like 2,300. I wonder why CPM rates are so low?
2. How many readers stayed online for more than 1 minute. The whole point of CiL is to help create engaging events for our users and their readers. Companies like Mogulus understand that duration is going to become far more important than pageviews.
3. How many readers clicked on the Replay. The 30,000+ live events run on our software (yes, that's a real number) tell us that the Replay readership is typically around 50% of readership when the event was Live. It is a huge benefit to keep your Replay up where your readers can find it. They do read them.
4. Repeat usage. Newsweek has been a great user of ours. They like us, we like them but they see us as important for marquee events (elections, debates, the Oscars). We need to become part of their core reporting structure. The Houston Chronicle also likes us but they use us for weather, local politics, sports, reader Q&A, music and have used the software over 250+ times. For us, that is success and is probably the most important metric we look at.
And since I'm not running for office any time soon, maybe I can stay true to what I just said.
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