By now we know there was no Pez dispenser, but for the love of all things holy, apparently… there was no dinner party either?
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WatchMojo NewsletterThese days, Peter Daboll is Chief of Insights at Yahoo! Once people stop laughing at that title, they realize that Mr. Daboll knows what he is talking about:
Before I joined Yahoo!, I was President and CEO of comScore Media Metrix, where we spent years grappling with the challenges of measuring a dynamic web environment. It’s 10,000 times more complicated than measuring television, and it’s only gotten more complicated in the last year or so, with the adoption of cool technologies like Ajax and Flash and the growth in video. They’ve changed the way Yahoo! and other companies are designing products for consumers, but they will also translate into page view declines.
All right, clearly, we’re listening.
In light of Yahoo! ceding the pageview throne to MySpace, Mr. Daboll is calling for a new measurement metric.
Yahoo! has long reigned in page views. But we knew we’d eventually cede this honor as we incorporated more consumer-friendly technologies into our products. And that’s OK with us, if it means our services will be better built for how people want to use the Internet today vs. in 1998.
We agree and commend Yahoo! for getting with the times and leading the way. We just think it’s ironic to ask for a new metric when the people investors, advertisers and decision-makers blindly turn to is comScore, NNR - who, with all due respect - have yet to fully grasp the nuances of online traffic. Coming from a random bloke like me, you might think that’s a pretty ballsy statement, and indeed it is, but for six years I’ve worked online and for six years, I’ve been baffled by how wrong sometimes NNR and comScore can be. The key word is “can.”
After all, there’s good and bad in everything.
Indeed, it’s a tough job measuring online traffic, but before calling for new measurement tools, we should perhaps see why our current model is somewhat broken, or at least not working.
The last thing we need is for comScore and NNR to introduce a new metric. To me, these companies are reactive, not proactive. They are historians, not soothsayers.
Allow me a simple example/anecdote:
As an entrepreneur operating in the video space, I find the dizzying number of different formats, platforms and standards hurting the growth of our industry. Instead of working with one another, platform companies are rushing to one-up one another, leaving would-be clients/partners like myself holding off making a decision as to which platform to go with.
That’s my experience in the video space. The same, I am sure applies to other fields.
In other words, we can scrap the pageview altogether (I am not a huge fan myself because publishers trick users into generating more pageviews instead if sending surfers where they want to go in the shortest steps) but before having the folks at comScore and NNR come up with another metric is not optimal.
The bottom line is that the page view has outgrown its usefulness. The industry needs to embrace change and develop new metrics that measure this new world more accurately. We all need to help to wean the industry off the crutch of familiar metrics in favor of more accurate and representative ones. We all need to be smart about these new metrics — the measurement companies, major publishers, and advertisers.
I remember a quote by Albert Einstein, who said something along the lines of: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” We can’t oversimplify complex web measurement. We need more innovative ideas and execution to measure new technologies and incorporate user behavior into measurement standards.
At Yahoo!, we’re working closely with the measurement firms and our internal analytics teams to ensure we’re creating the most accurate representation of user activity on our sites. Nobody has all the answers, so we need everyone pushing.
This is all great in theory, but what we need in the space is invention or consirable innovation, not a knee-jerk reaction by NNR and comScore to maintain their grip on the industry.
As far as I am concerned, the notion of a panel of 100,000 members, or even 1,000,000 people is somewhat ridiculous when the Web’s worldwide population this year crossed 17%, or 1 billion. The Web is far too complex, far too dynamic to rely on a historian to tell you what the future holds.
My gut says that the best and most reliable path lies in site-specific numbers, this is the Web after all. I’ll spare you an additional thousand words, but if you’d like to see what we mean, read this:
Google is the Future of Web Analytics
or
Opportunity for Google in Web Analytics.
I own Yahoo! stock, not Google. Nothing would make me happier than see Yahoo! take leadership in the form of invention or innovation, but the mere thought of Yahoo! (or anyone who has been around since 1998 and having something to protect), NNR and comScore sitting in a closed room deciding the fate of online audience measurement reminds me of why I never pursued a career in investment banking.
This is the Web, it’s for the people, by the people. Whomever than can craft a better system than NNR and comScore will ultimately win, much the same way Google did something better than Altavista or Yahoo!
At my old gig, I also wrote quite a bit in addition to serving as the company’s VP of Sales. I was also the resident interview, interviewing a wide array of folks from Jenna Jameson, to Hugh Hefner and Joe Montana. In fact, as we speak, HipMojo.com is working on some interviewees that should please the venerable readers of this blog. Stay tuned.
Anyway, as writer, some of my articles got picked up by AOL and MSN. That’s how two of my articles got read by over 1M readers. I was never up on Yahoo! though…
That changed now. Booyah.
All right, enough shameless promotion, back to work. If there are any people in the stock market, advertising, Internet or financing community you would like us to do Q&A’s with it, drop me a line at ash @ mojosupreme.com.
Interesting inside look at what transpired at Time Warner, with Jon Miller being replaced by Randy Falco:
Mr. Falco was not interested in anything but a chief executive’s position — otherwise he would have happily stayed at NBC Universal — but he was surprised when Mr. Bewkes offered him the job of running AOL. With digital distribution and the Internet the current obsession of all media executives, Mr. Falco did not see his lack of direct management of a Web business as an impediment.
“I’m not sure that convergence is the issue anymore,” he said. “There is a shift going on, and it’s dramatic; the consumer is living on the Net and as a result, the advertisers are on the Net.”
Read the full story here. I agree with Mr. Falco on that, the whole “convergence” buzzword is as much hype as synergy talk when there is a merger. The key is: there is an opportunity, people spend 25% online and advertisers spend 5% of their budgets online, we call it 25/5 Divide, feel free to suggest something catchier.
The interesting thing is that if AOL really wants to pursue ad opportunities, they should perhaps adapt their portal strategy and focus on developing niches, contextual ones. That seems to be the best way to manage one’s inventory. The problem with portals is that indeed they can charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for their main page, but the main page is limited in the sense that you can only sell 365 home page displays. Sure, this capped supply drives up proces, but it drives up prices to the point that advertising becomes cost prohibitive and marketers look elsewhere. This is what we think happened to Yahoo!, when it warned against Q3, 2006 earnings.
By cutting up a major site like AOL in smaller, more focused niches, they might make more money in the long run.
The thing that is curious is how long stockholders and Wall Street will remain patient. Time Warner’s stock has done much better than Viacom but has lagged Disney and News Corp. in 2006 (see which media company was the stock of the year here). If they sell AOL, which we don’t think they will, they will lose a lot of growth. It was growth that drove News Corp.’s stock in 2006. The problem is that MySpace - which drove growth at News Corp.’s FIM division is a few years old; AOL is mature and as such, moving the needle might prove harder.
We would know, working with AOL is not easy, never has been easy, and won’t be easy. But when Time Warner’s CEO Dick Parsons issues out his wish list, we can’t help but smile at the dichotomy between theory and practice. We’ll leave it at that…
Disclaimer: Yahoo!, I own the stock.
One of the major storylines of the Web’s current boom is that many tech companies open up their APIs. This in turn gets many entrepreneurs excited because we realize that we can get an application or feature from concept to reality much more easily than we could otherwise.
Of course, the problem here is that said tech company can also turn off an API. That is what Google did today.
Incidentally, when I thought of MetaMojo.com, I used Yahoo!’s search API but quickly realized it was foolish to do so, so we then swapped out Yahoo! for our own index and database.
This was a case of going against the grain: a successful VC advised me against it, saying we should use Yahoo!’s API and work on add-on’s. I thought that might be foolish as we might one day end up with the coolest add-on’s that have nothing to add to.
We also used our search platform to create a video meta search. All to say, this should be a lesson to any entrepreneur looking to build a company on another company’s API. Use it to test your idea, but don’t think it’s a smart long term idea.
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