Online media: The decade of the pageview comes to an end

If you work in online media, you may remember the excited buzz around the middle of the decade over a Web programming technology called AJAX. It allowed for sites to present text and graphics in new ways, and allowed users to control information and other page elements in ways that were not possible before. For instance, you could drag something from one part of the page to another, or activate a pop-up window in a slick, fluid, expanding motion.

AJAX is commonplace now -- Gmail, Facebook, and many other popular media and social networking sites use it for navigation or other functionality. But when AJAX first started making a splash, it got a lot of people in the online media business thinking about different ways to present their own content as well as advertisements. What if readers didn't have to navigate away from the page to read a related article? Was it finally a chance to break away from the pageview paradigm for measuring content popularity, advertising impressions, and site growth?

A lot of people hoped so. Yahoo presented its case for moving away from the pageview in 2006. Journalists and media pundits looked forward to banishing slideshows, celebrity news and other pageview-friendly content to the sidelines. Some people in the advertising industry began to get excited about measuring "engagement" on media sites instead of raw ad impressions or ad clicks.

Fast-forward to the end of 2009, and have we realized these visions? Not quite. Time spent on site is a useful metric, but when it comes to online news and advertising the pageview still rules the roost. You don't have to look far to see the evidence -- slideshows, top-50 lists, and celebrity news are everywhere. Standard display advertising is usually sold and measured according to CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) or CPC (cost per click). When new media kingpin Nick Denton talks about how Gawker and his other blogging creations compare to the New York Times, he cites pageviews.

So why hasn't time on site and AJAXy display models knocked the PV off its perch? I recently had a chance to answer that question in an email to a media scholar, who remembered the talk of change from the middle of the decade and wondered why publishers still haven't made the switch. I wrote:

... For years, I’ve been hearing about “time spent on site” being used as a selling point for online advertising, which would be wonderful for some very unique AJAX-powered displays of news content. Madison Ave. would probably love it too, as it would potentially allow for creative campaigns that leverage highly engaged users who are not jumping off to the next page right away.

But it hasn’t happened yet, at least not on the dozens of news sites I visit every day. I think there are several reasons why online publishers haven’t embraced AJAX-based news display, and instead stick with page views:

• Most online display advertising is still booked according to impressions and clicks (CPM and CPC) which favors page views and/or unique visits over time on site. If it came down to one user being exposed to the same ad for 1 minute vs. one user seeing four different ads for 15 seconds vs. four users being exposed to the same ad for 15 seconds vs. four users being exposed to four different ads for 15 seconds, I believe most publishers and advertisers would prefer the last three options.
• The technical foundations of the online advertising ecosystem -- display ad standards, technologies used by ad networks and ad serving companies, metrics packages (such as Omniture) and news content management systems -- are oriented toward CPM and CPC campaigns. Any AJAX-oriented system would have to be compatible with these technologies to make a big impact, which reduces the flexibility that an AJAX-driven display allows (for instance, you can’t have old content slide horizontally off the frame using AJAX if a standard “skyscraper” unit appears in the right rail – such ad units aren’t designed to be counted or turned off in such a manner)
• Costs for developing AJAX-driven news sites are high. There are some experimental sites out there, but I haven’t heard of any production-ready modules that can be easily slotted into popular CMSes, such as Drupal. That means publishers would have to do a lot of customization and integration work on their own, which can be very expensive.

Now, in the mobile world things are a bit different. On my iPod Touch, I see that the NYT app does allow for long stories and menus to be slid underneath an advertising and navigation overlay. It’s not AJAX, but it supports a model for viewing content and ads that is not dependent upon the almighty pageview. I suspect that the NYT take this approach out of necessity – the iPhone API supports it, it reduces the numbers of calls to the NYT and ad servers to pick up and process new content, and relatively small pieces of content on a small screen can serve an outsized purpose simply because they are spending more time in front of readers’ eyeballs.

But for such a system (AJAX or otherwise) to work on the Web, there would have to be a major industry shift among publishers and advertising platforms to support it. My guess is it won’t happen soon, unless a major player develops a product or service that makes it attractive to do so. Google has the clout and the resources to do something like this, but an news/ad industry task force could also get things moving.

I didn't say this in my email to the media scholar, but Yahoo actually got it right in 2006 -- they were just five or 10 years too early. The pageview may still be king as the decade winds down, but it won't sit atop the online publishing throne forever. I think that the next decade will see a huge change in the way online advertising and news content is measured and sold. The pageview will fade in importance, and various measures of engagement will replace it to determine value and reach. It may take some time to work out the technical and industry roadblocks, or Google may speed things up with a new product announcement, but it will change in the teens.

Naturally, this will have a corresponding impact on the type of news and information that sites provide to their readers. Will it mean a return to long-form journalism? I don't think so. People don't have the time, attention spans, and freedom from distractions that once allowed them to plow through a 3,000-word feature from start to finish. Instead, I think that an increased emphasis on reader comments, online discussions and multimedia will be used to keep people on sites longer. And, although it will make journalism purists cringe, the 50-chapter "best of" lists will continue to thrive, albeit in AJAXy wrappers that don't necessarily generate new page views. As long as the definition of "engagement" or "time on site" is the most important metric to advertisers, any content that attracts eyeballs for more than a few minutes is fair game.

More posts by Ian Lamont on the future of media:

• The crisis in journalism: Short-term hope, long-term uncertainty
• The Tiger Woods accident simulated in 3D shows the future of newscasts
• The business of media: The newsosaur speaketh
• The business of media, part II: Blame journalists' ethical lapses?
• Boston Globe advertising: What's wrong with this picture
• Boston Globe relaunches forums, but they're doing it all wrong
• Google News: Biased or broken?

Reuters' "new network of syndication": A great idea for news, or another information quasimonopoly?

A senior Reuters executive made some comments about the future of news to an FTC workshop recently, which were published on Reuters.com yesterday. It was interesting to see the company downplay the role of aggregators -- one of Rupert Murdoch's favorite bugaboos -- but I was far more intrigued by the outline of a "new network of syndication" that Reuters is proposing to create new revenue streams for content creators and eliminate redundancy.

Sounds like a super solution to save journalism and find workable business models for news, right? Well, I thought it through and came back with the following comment:

To “stop wasting resources on writing the umpteenth undifferentiated story that is available elsewhere” sounds great in theory, but there are a few formidable issues to realizing that vision:

1) Audiences overlap, and the same story may have to be tailored in minor ways to appeal to different audiences, based on local issues, the “tone” or expertise of the publication, and other factors. Two stories that may appear “undifferentiated” to you actually have different angles, emphasis, or additional facts that actually make them more suitable or the audiences they are aimed at. Publications want to be differentiated in some way, and using the same outsourced copy does not help them achieve that goal.

2) There needs to be a system of trust and baseline quality in place, but also great flexibility considering the types of content providers and multitude of publications using it.

3) Making Reuters and a few other specialist players the powerbrokers will lead to news oligopolies — kind of like we had before the advent of the Internet, execept on global scale. That doesn’t sound like progress to me.

Ian Lamont

Managing Editor

The Industry Standard

More posts by Ian Lamont on the future of media:

• The crisis in journalism: Short-term hope, long-term uncertainty
• The Tiger Woods accident simulated in 3D shows the future of newscasts
• The business of media: The newsosaur speaketh
• The business of media, part II: Blame journalists' ethical lapses?
• Boston Globe advertising: What's wrong with this picture
• Boston Globe relaunches forums, but they're doing it all wrong
• Google News: Biased or broken?

The Tiger Woods accident simulated in 3D shows the future of newscasts

Spotted on Fake Steve Jobs: A video from a Taiwanese news program that depicts Tiger Woods' car crash using 3D animation (starts at 15 seconds in):
Some people may find the use of an anguished avatar (Woods' wife) in a machinima clip to be funny. Indeed, I suspect that this unusual format for reporting the news is the reason it was included in a well-known parody blog. But for years we've seen similar techniques used to simulate airplane crashes or the microscopic interactions between drugs and the human body -- why shouldn't computer-generated environments be used to depict a car crash or other commonplace events?

3D news applications are often experimental (see my 2006 post on NewsAtSeven) and when you do see simulations of events on U.S. news stations, they tend to be limited to the national networks that have the required staff and computing resources. But once machinima tools get easier/cheaper to use, and/or incorporate public mapping data and even models of building interiors, I expect that the use of news simulations will rise dramatically. They will will get more sophisticated, too, thanks to the geodata as well as near-photorealistic computer graphics.

There is also the possibility of bringing 3D anchors into the scene, and incorporating other types of metadata, as I described in a 2007 paper:

In the future, similar news applications could allow 3D avatars to be customized to mimic real news anchors (Walter Cronkite, Katie Couric, Jack Williams), other real people (someone's father, a favorite teacher, a politician), characters based on a set of self-selected attributes, or one's own avatar. The avatars might be seated in a simulated newsroom, or could be moved to a computer-generated environment that mirrors the real-life location where the news that he or she is describing took place. The environment might be based upon geotags and other metadata that were generated by the original reports and video footage. The news itself can also be fine-tuned, based on specific categories, locations, times, and keywords chosen by the viewer. I may choose to have the first half of my newscast consist of developments relating to the New York Stock Exchange in the previous 24 hours. For the second half, I may restrict my anchor to reading reports that mention "China" or "Beijing" in the lede and have accompanying video footage sourced from any clip taken in Beijing or Shanghai within the past six hours. Detailed metadata would be crucial to creating such a report.

So, don't assume that the 20th century model used by newscasts today to report recent events -- handsome people in suits  reading from teleprompters and rolling clips of prerecorded video -- will hold true in the years to come. We'll be seeing more 3D simulations, animations, and avatars, as well as an increased use of Internet-based data sources to get an understanding of the news.