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Why (Current) Web Statistics Don’t Mean Squat

Jeff Nolan | August 17th
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I would sum up this puff piece on the so-called new AOL as “we’re big, we’re bad, we’re AOL”.

But AOL, often derided as the original gated community, is now manufacturing a broad array of digital media that is free for the grabbing. There are 300 working content producers in its New York headquarters, backed by hundreds of other freelancers and programmers in Bangalore, Dublin and Dulles, cranking out copy and editing photos for more than 80 Web sites. Ten are ranked in Technorati’s top 100. Politics Daily, which began in April, already has 3.6 million unique users a month, while Politico, a much more established name, has 1.1 million. In the aggregate, the media properties at AOL have about 76 million unique visitors.

[From The Media Equation - AOL Builds Content as Mainstream Media Falters - NYTimes.com]

Here’s the problem for AOL, which the NYTimes apparently doesn’t see because they themselves have the same issue: it’s not how many people are hitting your URL, it’s what they do with you once they get their that matters. While community may be the most abused and mis-used word in media at the moment, image engagement matters more than ever and the best brands in media know it. AOL is, for the most part, fighting the last war by focusing on unique users and pageviews. If either of those stats actually mattered anymore, well the newspaper business would be a growth industry right now.

Suggesting that your place on the Technorati Top 100 is a proof point for your success is pretty lame, just as much so as reciting your traffic stats. How about some new stats that measure how viral your content is, as in propensity to be shared directly by visitors or on other topically related sites, and depth of engagement that measures, beyond time spent, what site visitors are doing when they get there, like commenting, clicking on sponsor links, etc.?

So while AOL is trying to be Huffington Post, by bringing individual authors and brand names under one masthead, Huffington Post itself is going to personalized news in a big way with their Facebook Connect initiative. Poor AOL, always a day late and a dollar short…

[Reposted with permission – original link]

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About Jeff Nolan

My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. What started, in 2002, as a simple initiative to understand this thing called “blogs” that I kept hearing about has evolved into something much more significant. Home About Venture Chronicles About Venture Chronicles My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. What started, in 2002, as a simple initiative to understand this thing called “blogs” that I kept hearing about has evolved into something much more significant. Along the way to becoming a bona fide blogger I started to understand the implications of user generated content. At the time I was a venture capitalist for SAP, the enterprise software company, and in my travels in the enterprise software market it became evident that blogging would be a powerful communication channel for enterprises to use, what we now call social media, and a powerful information collection mechanism for bottom up corporate intelligence. Combined with search technology, social networking software, and wikis, I was witnessing the inception of an entirely new generation of knowledge management software. I am currently the VP Product Marketing for Get Satisfaction, the simple and effective way to build online communities that enable productive conversations between companies and their customers. Over 50,000 companies use Get Satisfaction to create a social support experience, build better products, realize SEO benefits, and take advantage of brand loyalty behaviors that results in strong word of mouth marketing experiences in the market. I can be reached at jnolan-at-gmail-dot-com.