Here are a few notes from a recent cross-country flight. I’m not sure what I was reading at the time (“The Lean Startup?”), but it’s sound advice. Any really good accountant will tell you that the numbers should inform your decisions, not make them. Analytics work best when chasing incremental growth, not opening up new […]
The Religion of Analytics Read More »
Since the election, my former co-worker Sean Gallagher has been doing a great series on the presidential election’s digital campaigns for Ars Technica. After reviewing the campaigns’ financials, his overall conclusion is that by hiring great people and focusing on open-source and off-the-shelf tools, the Obama campaign created a competitive advantage while saving huge amounts
IT Dept Deathmatch: Obama’s Project Narwhal vs. Romney’s Orca Read More »
The New York Times’ Tanzina Vega reports on a type of automated ad buying called programmatic or real-time bidding (RTB), the latest advancement from the ad network community. The general idea is that an ad buyer bids on every page where a prospective buyer goes, in real-time. The intended result is to get an ad or series of ads to follow the customer across the web. The unintended result is that it lowers the revenue of every media property that participates.
Why Digital Media Can’t Rely on an Advertising-Only Business Model Read More »
The media is finally figuring out figures. The coverage of Nate Silver’s tremendous success at statistical analysis has shown both that sophisticated data analysis can be newsworthy — and have tremendous real-world impact. According to the New Republic, on Nov 5th, Silver’s 538 blog garnered over 20 percent of NYTimes.com’s traffic. (deadlink: http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/109714/nate-silver-the-times-biggest-brand) While publishing
Media Enters the Age of (Statistical) Reason Read More »
They look like this: Just for the record: The quote is from Yoda in “Star Wars,” not Dumbledore (“Harry Potter”), and the image is of Ian McKellen as Gandalf. Also, here’s another wildcard, the image isn’t from “Lord of the Rings” It is a promotion still from the film “The Hobbit.” The Dark Glass via
When Fact-Checkers Have Nightmares Read More »
In the past two years, many large media properties have begun focusing on delivering “sharable” content — articles aimed at increasing links in social media. This is somewhat in contrast to a common strategy of the previous years: creating “searchable” content, aimed at increasing an article’s presence in search. However, in spite of the emphasis,
Delivering ‘Likeable’ Content NPR-Style Read More »
Mark J. Perry, author of the popular Carpe Diem economics blog, says that advertising revenue is in the kind of freefall that he calls ” another one of those huge Schumpeterian gales of creative destruction.” Here is his evidence: via Mark J. Perry’s Carpe Diem blog
Will Newspapers Be Gone in Five Years? Read More »
Often forgotten in the development rush, regularly updated XML sitemaps are essential in guaranteeing that search engines crawl all your content. Here is Google on the subject: Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover. In its simplest terms, a XML Sitemap—usually called Sitemap, with a
The Most Important SEO Tool In the World Read More »
Google Insights is no more. It has been absorbed by Google Trends. Both Trends and Insights have been useful tools for writers and editors looking to improve their articles’ SEO. Google Trends also lends itself nicely to a game I call “Celine Dion or Torture?” where you put in phrases until you find an unrelated,
Google Trends Eats Google Insights, Also “Celine Dion or Torture?” Read More »
Danny Sullivan’s “Search Engine Land” is always a great source of info on the dark continent of search engine optimization. They’ve just released an infographic that covers both factors that are under the control of site owners and those more nebulous elements as “authority,” and “reputation.” It’s a clever cheat sheet, and for most, all
Search Engine Land’s “Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors” Read More »