Publishing - the only metric that matters

Publishers (and bloggers specifically) tend to measure their business on two parameters:

1. Page views
2. Ad revenues

These are fine metrics, but I believe that they are derivatives of a much more fundamental metric which, if ignored, could be devastating to a publisher's business. Lets call this metric the "Reader's Goodwill Pot".

Lets assume an imaginary pot into which imaginary goodwill points can be deposited, and from which imaginary goodwill points can be depleted. Sort of like a bank account for goodwill. Now, as a publisher/blogger, imagine you are running this kind of 'goodwill account' with your audience of readers.

When you post great content you are adding points into the pot. When you provide your reader with a great user experience you are adding points to this pot.

If you build a big enough goodwill pot, with a big enough audience, then you can dip into that pot occasionally, take some points away and put them in your pocket. That is also usually known as advertising.

As a publisher, with every pixel you put on your site (or ink on paper, or frame on screen, etc), with every piece of content you produce, with every ad you take on your site - this is the single most important metric you should obsess over. Am I putting goodwill points into my piggy bank, or am I taking some away?

Great publishers understand that the need to keep this balance is far more important than the need to track any of the other metrics - PV's and revenues, for example - in isolation.

As we hit a recession, I suspect many more bloggers and traditional publishers are going to ignore this metric and will try squeezing the lemon as much as possible by cutting on the content and the user experience, and at the same time trying to maximize the number of ads that interrupt the readers. Publishers ignoring the 'Reader's Goodwill Pot' will not survive, not because of the bad macro economy, but rather because they failed to understand the micro economy of publishing.   

{Image CC by: Nieve44/La Luz . Thanks!}

Comments

[hesky]

My dear Yaron

Not sure you are entirely correct. some sites place important on unique visitors due to the fact that the larger the audience the easier it is to get into advertiser. Also not all page views are equal. for us forum traffic is completely unmonetizeable..

[Yaron Galai]

Hey Hesky - great to have you here!
I didn't mean that uniques are not important... just meant to say that it should be a secondary metric, not the primary one.
A good example of companies that obsess over uniques instead of reader goodwill, are the domain parkers. They give up any hope of any reader ever coming back to their site/s in good conscious. So whenever a reader does hit their page, they try to squeeze that lemon as much as possible. They scare the reader away, but hope that while he's fleeting the page it will be accidentally through an ad. My 2c - that's not a good sustainable business to be in... ;-)