Nielsen//NetRatings attempts to measure engagement

Nielsen//NetRatings posted their official announcement of the release of two new metrics in NetView, "Total Minutes" and "Total Sessions".

"'Total Minutes' is the best engagement metric in this initial stage of  Web 2.0 development, not only because it ensures fair measurement of Web sites using RIA [rich Internet applications] and streaming media, but also of Web environments that have never been well-served by the page view, such as online gaming and Internet applications," said Scott Ross, director of product marketing for Nielsen NetView.

For the past year, everyone has been talking about how to measure engagement, and it has been interesting watching the scramble to figure it out. While we all are skeptical in our overly-critical industry, this is at least a step forward to abandon the page view crutch. Optimizing sites to page views tends to give permission for publishers to make users jump through click-hoops to get what they are looking for instead of creating a more efficient (and therefore better) user experience.

Hot topics still in debate include the impact from tabbed browsing, comparing sites like Google that optimize to relevancy verses a site like MySpace, applications like AIM 'boosting" site rankings, and any changes in media buying to focus on quality instead of CPM-driven quantity.

.   

Second Life research study

Reuters reports that a new study (PDF) on Second Life is available from EPN, a Dutch non-profit group that studies the effects of technology and communication.

The study found that “there is a strong correlation between well-being and success in Second Life and well-being and success in real life.”

The study has a number of informative graphics that range from motives for being in Second Life to gender, education and income.

Can we think a little harder about engagement?

Writing in Search Insider, Bill Wise presents a kinda reactionary perspective on the IAB's "Media more engaging" campaign. I've written about this topic before, and have the general reaction that if the IAB is on one (slanted) side of the teeter-totter, Bill's search-centric position takes us all the way over to the other extreme. Makes for good blog copy, but it's likely that a truly productive online engagement conversation will come out in somewhere in the middle. 

I would suggest that online engagement needs to span time and events and vary based on user segment/scenario... for sure, to Bill's point, you have searchers who are actively in-market in one segment, and that scenario suggests as rapid a drive to ROI as possible. You also have a segment of searchers doing research for a considered purchase, and who aren't going to convert today -- and who are going to have a completely distinct business case for engagement.  You have brands only purchased offline -- beer, for example -- who mostly want to get the consumer engaged in the brand. You have offline purchases -- Diet Coke, for example -- where marketers want to drive a deeper level of engagement with the brand over time, enriched with actual data.

It all comes down to how you define engagement. If we persist in letting offline marketers define it as a one-time event, as in "How engaging was your tv spot?" then we are missing the true value of the engagement conversation -- how do we work cross-media, over time, to make our brand meaningful to our consumers in the various contexts they bring to it? 

Reducing engagement to a conversation about ROI misses half the story -- we measure and optimize against an effect we hope to create. Engagement (in the broader sense which I propose) sets up the right range of effects based on the brand, business model and user scenarios. Measurement helps us improve efficiency and effectiveness. ROI is not a strategy -- it's a measure of success against a strategy.

Technorati: State of the Blogosphere Oct 2006

David Sifry released Technorati's State of the Blogosphere post today. David states that about 55% of all blogs are "active," meaning there has been a post made to the blog in the past three months.

Here are the highlights:

• "Technorati is now tracking more than 57 Million blogs.
• Spam-, splog- and sping-fighting efforts at Technorati are paying dividends in terms of the reduction of garbage in our indexes, even if it does seem to impact overall growth rates.
• Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size approximately every 230 days.
• About 100,000 new weblogs were created each day, again down slightly quarter-over-quarter but probably due in part to spam fighting efforts.
• About 4% of new splogs get past Technorati's filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.
• There is a strong correlation between the aging and post frequency of blogs and their authority and Technorati ranking.
• The globalization of the blogosphere continues. Our data appears to show both English and Spanish languages are a more universal blog language than the other two most dominant language, Japanese and Chinese, which seem to be more regionally localized.
• Coincident with a rise in blog posts about escalating Middle East tensions throughout the summer and fall, Farsi has moved into the top 10 languages of the blogosphere, indicating that blogging continues to play a critical role in debates about the important issues of our times."

Disruptive Technology: The Venice Project

Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis are surely the poster boys for disruptive technology.  The co-founders of KaZaA were basically on the run for most of the late 90's.  Then came Skype, which turned the telco world on its ear and was sold to eBay for "billions."

Not content to take a breather, the pair now plans to tackle television. In an interview with Om Malik, Janus Friis described The Venice Project: "What we have done is created a streaming P2P platform for television. This is a platform, which is good for content owners, for advertisers and of course the viewers. Since there are no borders on the Internet, this is a global platform."

In a bid to not be global criminals on the run, Janus says they will be respecting all copyrights. 

Bruno Giussani summarizes the offering:

• "streaming peer-to-peer television (near-TV quality)
• free to the user (just download the client software)
• ad-supported (with ad targeting)
• deals with content providers (revenue-share)
• time-shifted
• searchable
• with "social TV" features (tagging, recommendations, etc)"

In addition to the disruptive effect on the broadcast model, The Venice Project has major implications for marketers. Targeted ads with solid measurement could be the solution to the burning question of how to advertise on social networks.  Which could mean the timing of The Venice Project could not be better. 

Consider Bambi Fransisco's analysis of the percentage of advertising currently going to social networks: "Social networks are estimated to attract $280 million in ad dollars this year, according to eMarketer. Online video-sharing sites are estimated to attract about $385 million. EMarketer estimates that $15.9 billion will be spent in online advertisements in the U.S. this year. That means social networks and video-sharing sites only attract about 1.8% to 2.5% of total online ad spending."

Jakob Nielsen: Participation Inequality

Jakob Nielsen looks at the participation of users in communities and discusses strategies in increase contributions.

Thesis: In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

Jakob reviews the research and gives and overview of the many problems caused by a lack of contributing users. Companies interested in feedback suffer from unrepresentative samples. Product and service reviews site have a similar problem; all the reviews are written by the same people, a "tiny minority" of the total site viewers.

Fixing the contribution problem: You can't.

But you can try and make it more a little more equal.

Jakob's areas of improvement:

• Make it easier to contribute
• Make participation a side effect
• Edit, don't create
• Reward - but don't over reward - participants
• Promote quality contributors

See also:
Drooping Tail and Log-Log Charts
Zipf Curves and Website Popularity

OMMA on Engagement

Searchviews reports out on a conversation about media measurement from OMMA in which a part of the conversation focused on engagement. Glad that everyone is now talking about online engagement as its own animal, with the ability to be far more focused and actionable than the generalized conversation about engagement that has been taking place over the past year or so.

However, I can't help but notice that the conversation still has a way to go. In her portion of the session, for example,  Lauren Weinberg focuses on a pretty primitive metric -- time spent on a website -- as an indicator of the likelihood of a message being absorbed. There are a couple key ways in which we've been applying the notion of engagement as we structure online campaigns that I think need to be incorporated

• "Time spent" needs to be much more granular; for instance, our engagement models often look at both breadth and depth of participation on the site (breadth = number of topical areas, breadth = penetration of topical area content/functionality)
• The notion of "absorbing the message" is too tied to an old-media view of "can you recall and explain the key message of my ad", when online user can move from saw the ad to compared the product to bought it over a highly measurable timespan of one or more online sessions.

Finally, it's become clear to us that engagement models need to be customized by marketer type (publisher, online retailer, offline retailer, etc.) and further by individual brand. There is no one model for engagement. It's far more important that an individual client be able to use the tool to maximize their own marketing effectiveness and efficiency that their be one model that can be compared across multiple advertisers, IMHO.

comScore Online Video Numbers

From the comScore press release:

More than 106.5 million people, or about 3 out of every 5 U.S. Internet users, streamed or downloaded video during the month of July.  In total, nearly 7.2 billion videos were streamed or downloaded by U.S. Internet users for an average of 67 streams per streamer, which means the typical video streamer viewed an average of more than two streams per day.

“The surge in Web video content enables advertisers to expand beyond banners and reach online audiences using sight, sound and motion,” said Erin Hunter, executive vice president of comScore’s Media and Entertainment Group.  “Fundamental to the effectiveness of online video as an advertising medium is an accurate measurement of streaming video – and comScore is delighted to be the first company to provide that capability to the marketplace.”

The typical U.S. streamer on MySpace initiated an average of 39 streams during the course of the month, or slightly more than one per day.  Yahoo! Sites ranked second in total streams initiated by U.S. users with 812 million, followed by YouTube with 649 million.