Measuring internet “engagement”

Posted on October 25, 2006 by JoeDuck

Robert Scoble’s asking a great question today about how to measure “engagement” at a website as opposed to just a visit. This issue was recently addressed at some length in the big debate over Comscore metrics for Myspace that Danah Boyd challenged as questionable.

As I suggested in that debate and Scoble is saying now, there’s an important difference between a user who simply loads a page and leaves the site immediately vs a user who engages with the site.

Experiments are needed, since it may be as simple as taking a ratio of total unique visitors to total time online to get a sense of how engaged the visitors are.

Of course that does NOT necessarily translate into somebody who’ll buy from advertisers which is the type of metric that sponsors are most interested in. We wouldn’t see much Golf on network TV if traffic was the metric, but when you count the fact that golf watchers come from a great demographic for big ticket items it works out for the networks who can sell to a key group (e.g. sell Lexuses, Diamondses, and ringses …..my precious!…..)

Even more complications with metrics are here in the form of RSS syndication, extensive duplication of information (e.g. this blog is auto duplicated over at Facebook), and the new gadgetification of the desktop where mini applications are going to run wild all over the place, making a “page view” less relevant, or irrelevant, for many websites and advertisers and measurers.

Re-Ze-lated:
Funny – ZeFrank on “Rocketbooming” your metrics
RocketBoom says Zefrank is full of Zeerrors.

Kevin Rose to Newscorp: Digg this $150,000,000 price tag?

Posted on October 25, 2006 by JoeDuck

It now appears that Digg probably won’t be sold to Newscorp and may simply go for another round of financing. If so Rose and Zuckerman over at Facebook may be sharing some pizza in a few years thinking “wow, we turned down HOW MUCH?” One uncertainty with Digg appears to be traffic. Comscore shows a small fraction of what Digg claims and Alexa traffic seems to support. However Alexa is notoriously unreliable, often showing huge swings where none exist and seeming to favor tech sites, probably because the toolbar Alexa uses to count visits is more often on the computers of tech people. For Digg, itself a high page view high tech site, Alexa is a questionable measure.

The Comscore traffic discrepancy is so huge that either Digg or Comscore’s credibility should be at stake. Not so in this new bubbling time where nobody seems to care much about the facts, just the hype. Like YouTube, Digg offers little of substance, a lot of page views, and not much revenue. They are lucky the pockets are so deep and the rationale so thin for these megabuck deals.

Zune song sharing can be summed up in two words. Brilliant, and Finally!

Posted on October 24, 2006 by JoeDuck

Rumor has it that Zune will encourage song sharing with revenue share to the “user song promoter” who sends a song to friends to listen to free and then gets some money if they buy it. MS certainly would be wise to cut the users in on the profits.

As I recently noted it’s surprising how users still don’t demand more of a piece of the action, though not surprising how Google, YouTube, Myspace, Yahoo, MSN, and other user content collection points, the key beneficiaries of this arrangement, have not done much to innovate in that direction.

Good for MS to break that ice. Users, collectively, hold all the *future* revenue streams in their wallets. Therefore they could hold most of the power. It’s about time they used it.

More at CrunchGear

Google launches customized search

Posted on October 24, 2006 by JoeDuck

Wow, Matt notes that unlike offerings by Yahoo and LIVE, Google’s going to allow you to include thousands of URLs in a customized search specialized for your own websites.

This is exactly what I was looking for in travel as it allows you toa create a great regionally targeted search engine using “known and trusted” URLs combined with Google’s monster search power. They’ll also be sharing revenues from the searches though historically that’s been too small amount with the generic customized search (which they’ve had for some time).

Good going Google! Yahoo and MSN – copy this approach NOW!

Yahoo really should have come up with this “including many URLs” approach because it’ll encourage the community to pick trusted URLs to include in their searches, and Yahoo, unlike Google, would be comfortable using that human feedback. It’s spammable, sure, but a great spam fighting tool in that the power of the whole community is unleashed in the selection process.

Hey! I built one for Oregon Travel and will upgrade California Travel with more good sites soon. This has a lot of potential if Google uses the community input to help weed out crappy sites and upgrade unknown sites, though they tend to avoid this type of human (and therefore spammable) input. Yahoo is more comfortable with that approach so I hope they are taking advantage of it via the Rollyo and Yahoo custom search user inputs.

MORE about this:

Danny I was hoping for more – how about a Search UNconference?

Posted on October 23, 2006 by JoeDuck

I don’t know Danny Sullivan personally aside from comments at his blog and forums, but all reports say he’s a fine guy and easily one of the top search specialists in the world.

When it looked like Danny would be leaving Search Engine Strategies earlier in the year I was optimistic that he might break those of us in the publishing and search marketing fields out of the ‘same old speakers’ and ‘same old pitches’ one tends to hear at the two main search conferences: SES and WebmasterWorld’s “PubCon”. However he’s not leaving yet, so I’m happy for him I guess but disappointed he won’t come up with something new.

I think many would agree that Danny’s the guy who could bring something really new and powerful to the growing, global, search marketing human (and information) network. Something that would capture the spirit of “Web 2.0” which is far more collaborative, information rich, virtual, and unstructured than the internet of the 1990s. Also, there are a HUGE number of case studies now that reflect all the common problems websites have. Simply examining all these in a conference environment would be far more helpful than listening to yet another SEO guy talk about how he gamed Google’s Algo five years ago.

I don’t want to be too critical of SES and WMW because these are good conferences all things considered. However after attending some UNconferences such as MashupCamp I’m convinced that the UNconference format (or things like Yahoo’s Hack Day) are vastly superior to the old standard where speakers, often with less experience than many in the audience, struggle to speak clearly and make with their weak powerpoint presentations relevant.

UNconferences, like Startup Camp in a few weeks, tend to unleash the power of the audience and ironically the lack of structure creates far more cohesive sessions. I think this is because your brain goes into active vs passive mode.

So Danny after you make your deserved big bucks back at SES over the next year, how about shaking things up for 2007?

Henry on Google

Posted on October 20, 2006 by JoeDuck

Henry Blodget, in my opinion, is writing some of the most thoughtful stuff about Google’s share price and prospects. Ironically he’s precluded from working in securities or offering personal stock advice – I think forever – due to his and other irrational exhuberances of the internet bubble days. Bubble ONE, that is. Bubble two is not a bubble, it’s a YouTubleGoogle Zeitgeisty thing.

The Gadget Revolution. Gadgets of the world, UNITE!

Posted on October 20, 2006 by JoeDuck

A nice ZDnet interview with Google’s Adam Sah suggests the increasing importance gadgets will play in the online landscape. I met a brilliantly enthusiastic Adam at Mashup Camp back in February when all this was just starting to take off and it’s great to see Google is now allowing the gadgets to be used on any website.

In March, at Microsoft’s MIX06, the innovative LIVE team was also very bullish on their LIVE Gadgets which clearly are destined to become a major focus over there as well.

Gadgets create some very interesting complications in terms of website stats and monetization. Google has not focused on monetizing this environment yet and it will be interesting to see how they approach that, though it’s easy to predict they’ll create some revenue share with the gadget publisher to keep everybody happy.

The legal fun may come from compatibility issues with IE7 and Vista. Microsoft would have some incentive to prefer their own sidebar gadgets, which will run on the Vista Desktop, to whatever Google gadgets are developed for that same niche. Yet Google as always is ahead of the marketing curve. Pushing gadgets to be compatible with websites, and not just those with Google desktop installed, may diminish what would have been a big MS advantage with Vista.

Hey – that’s a bit too cynical on my part – I think as they often have done Google is just expanding on a great concept that happens to be a good marketing route as well.

Google Gorg replacing Microsoft Borg? Don’t be P/E vil?

Posted on October 19, 2006 by JoeDuck

Chris “Factory Joe” Messina of Flock has a provocative post about how Google is …. continuing to take over the internet world.

Although I’m more concerned about the virtual monopoly on search rather than Google’s assualt on Microsoft’s virtual monopoly on operating systems and office applications, everybody is well served to start thinking, as Voltaire sort of suggested hundreds of years ago “Is an all-Google world the best of all possible worlds?”

The answer, of course, is NO. Google’s brought great stuff and should keep on bringing great stuff. Google’s been rewarded with almost unimaginable riches and that’s fine. It may even be true that the Google juggernaut has some juggernauting to do before it needs to be brought in check. Sometimes it’s great to let super clever people just run with things until they run out of steam.

But like Chris I think it’s now clear that stock prices and commercial considerations have considerable influence on Google and their decisions and operations. You don’t have to think Google is running around intentionally doing monopolistic things to worry that if the going gets tougher and they no longer have so much of the search market and are fighting to maintain the stock Price Earnings ratios and options values the “don’t be evil” mantra may be interpreted more as “don’t be P/Evil-keep Google on top”! Wait. I think that Mantra change is already under way.

Google is a great company, but as Chris suggests that doesn’t mean we should stop keeping our eyes on them.

Disclaimer: I’m hardly a market mover but should say I do have stock in Google competitor Yahoo and puts on Google because I thought it was overpriced.

Blog readers vs writers, redux VIII

Posted on October 18, 2006 by JoeDuck

My Cicarelli test of a few weeks ago, where I blogged about the top Technorati search term, sent a few hundred visits total over the two week period. It’s not clear they were “extra” visits though I think they were, but it would take more analysis than I want to do to determine if placing high for that term meant I was lower ranked for the more common technology themes you’d find on this blog.

Technorati still shows that very interesting imbalance between readers and writers. In fact I’m again hard pressed to explain many of these top searches without looking them up:

Top Tags –

See, these technorati top tags (below) are really different from the searches, reflecting the tech emphasis of most bloggers. In fact I find that I tend to blog about tech stuff in great disproportion to things I find more interesting simply because that’s the most common theme in the blog community and the conferences I blog about. I’m reading and living that stuff more than, say, political stuff which in many ways is more intriguing.

Blogs and tech sort of “go together”. I’d like that to change.

Yahoo – maybe they should change the exclamation point from ! to ?

Posted on October 18, 2006 by JoeDuck

It’s getting harder to be bullish on Yahoo even though I personally remain bullish on their long term prospects. Yahoo remains the number one website in the world, the number one video streaming site, and has the best and coolest picture posting community (Flickr). Yahoo has the best understanding and support for the new web aka “Web 2.0” and a robust developer network.

SO WHAT’S the PROBLEM YAHOO ?

Unfortunately for Yahoo and for shareholder me, Google and not Yahoo has been the overwhelming beneficiary of the swelling pots of online advertising money. Google’s contextual matching of websites and searches to advertisements has yielded better returns for publishers and advertisers, creating a very profitable win-win scenario that has made Google the hottest ~~advertising agency~~…whoops I mean technology company, in history.

Yahoo’s Panama was released yesterday and may help reduce the contextual matching advantage Google has enjoyed for years.

Wall Street doesn’t seem impressed so far, but what do they know anyway?

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Joe Duck

Have Blog. Will Travel. Vaccinate!

Category Archives: Web 2.0