Industry Trend of the Week

Page views have always been king on the Internet, they reveal how much interest there is in your website and how much you could charge for advertising. Unfortunately people invented 'bots to drive up PVs, thus skewing readership numbers and artifically inflating CPMs. Therefore it's a relief to see that a basic Piano tenet, time spent on a page, or as it's now termed, engagement, is finally becoming a basic and real metric.

Story of the Week

Rebekah Brooks returns as CEO of Britian’s Sun newspaper and turns off the paywall because the PVs are well under 1M. A good idea to gain more PVs and maybe increase digital ad revenue, but will it save the paper? Consider this: The Sun had 225,000 subscribers paying £8 per month, more than $33M per annum in digital subscription revenue. That’s a lot of money to recoup from banner ads at a $2.80 CPM if (a big if) the paper manages to deliver PVs. Also consider that the biggest newspaper website in the world, the Mail Online, with more than 30M PVs monthly is still losing money. I don’t think Ms. Brooks will be hailed as the savior of The Sun any time soon.

NPR is building an analytics bot that emphasizes caring over clicks

In 2011 Piano Media built a paywall system in Slovakia that paid participating publishers based on how long users spent on their sites. Now the idea is finally hitting the mainstream with both Chartbeat and Upworthy using “attention minutes” as a new ad metric. NPR has jumped on the wagon, receiving money from the Knight foundation to build a “Carebot” that will chart how long people stay on their site. Glad to see the rest of the world coming around to our view of paid content. For what it’s worth, Piano is still ahead of the curve with Composer, our new platform.

The Economist adopts time-based ad sales

The English publication is moving ad sales to an attention cost-per-hour basis. The “attention buy” will charge advertisers for ads that appear for five seconds or more. Attention includes users scrolling up and down on a page, typing or using a mouse. The model only applies to banner ads at this point although it will extend to video in the near future.

Newspapers go on the hunt for a safe place to pay

Preston thinks that newspapers are going to have to go after local markets internationally as they seek to expand and retain paying audiences in order to drive revenue forward.

The Guardian's Tim Gentry on why the digital advertising problem needs a unified solution

A report from the Media Briefing’s recent conference about what Tim Gentry believes is the problem with ad blocking and the underlying lack of truck between advertisers, users and the audience.

The Economist's Robin Raven on why hard paywalls fail: "Freemium is the only way to go”

Raven addresses what is working for the Economist and his recommendations for how to get content in front of a digital audience with the maximum effect on revenue.

Why publishers are using Instagram to connect with their communities

BBC News, CNN International and La Cronaca Italiana give insights into their use of Instagram to reach new and existing audiences and how they approach news formats on the platform.

500 publishers were hacked through anti-ad block tool PageFair

Beware the anti-ad blocking software. PageFair, who estimated last summer that ad blocking software is costing the industry $14B in online revenue, was hacked last weekend leaving more than 500 publisher’s websites open. Although they fixed the problem in 83 minutes it reveals that the battle is escalating between those who support ad blocking and those fighting the software.

What 3 publishers have learned from their approach to paywalls
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Chartbeat shares lessons learned on monetising audience, not traffic