During the dot com boom I was responsible for screening digital investment opportunities for a publishing company in New York. In a two-year period I met with 50-60 startups, most of which were “pure play.” Even during this period of digital exuberance, a business plan that dictated that 80% of revenue resided in the marketing budget was still suspect. But I saw two businesses that showed promise. One was in the online ad serving space; the other offered an efficient, cost-effective way to generate online subscriptions. The first was successful and still exists in a different iteration. The second one did not and the assets were sold to a major retailer. And there’s the tale.
What prompted my company to invest in the online subscription space was straightforward. Given the decline of PCH there was a need to develop a reliable subscription source that could scale. And we weren’t alone in our thinking. A number of major companies invested in this venture.
We learned quickly that the Internet was a wonderful margin-killer for both subscriptions and widgets. No product was immune. Given the fact that there were few, if any, barriers to entry, everyone could get into the subscription game—and many did.
About a decade later magazine publishers can cite as a genuine success story the ability to generate print subscriptions at scale from offers on their web sites or third party sites. What happened?
If there was a silver lining to the dot com bust it is that the publishing industry was able to develop a next generation of digital marketers who would be ready with the arrival of Web 2.0 and broadband. So it wasn’t that the Internet was no longer a margin killer; it was that online marketers got smarter and became versed in SEO, SEM and other applications to improve the e-commerce functions of their sites.
So it was about time and technology.
I was thinking the same thing after I left a meeting the other day during which someone talked about mobile’s “hockey-stick” future. Of course, this is a compelling argument and metaphor. Gartner Research recently reported that by 2014 more people will access the web with their mobile devices than through their PC’s. That is not insignificant. But I have learned in my study of psychology, every development has a shadow side and with mobile, as still with the web to a certain extent, the shadow side probably has to do with metrics.
Enter Ground Truth, a Seattle-based mobile measurement firm that has just launched the first mobile measurement service to use census-based measures of actual mobile Internet usage from millions of U.S. mobile subscribers. This data comes directly from mobile operators who can report aggregated mobile data usage on any visited mobile site. Ground Truth measures actual data and what people actually do on a mobile site. In other words no survey or recall is involved. The information is reported on a weekly basis. Ground Truth can also tell users where they rank or where the site lost traffic to. Of particular interest was that half of the mobile sites ranked are mobile-centric brands. Equally interesting is that more than 60% of mobile page views measured by Ground Truth go to social sites.
Jason Spero, GM for AdMob North America said that “Ground Truth’s data will give marketers the visibility into the web that they need to better plan and evaluate their mobile campaigns every week, including browsing patterns and engagement metrics. This unbiased information is critical and was previously unavailable in the market, which made justifying mobile strategies—and spending—a real challenge.”
With the proliferation of e-readers there is a lot of talk about developing metrics that are consistent with the platform and usage.
From what I can tell Ground Truth’s measurement of mobile satisfies that dictum.
Have a look: www.groundtruth.com.
Charles McCullaghcmccullagh@magazine.org
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