As publishers pivot and restructure (and repeat), they're looking hard for ways to move beyond the Google-Facebook duopoly dominating online advertising, and the wildly differing ways those companies have defined key metrics tracking performance. Accordingly, a new consortium has been announced to figure out metrics that are more consistent, and more usefully describe loyal audiences for those publishers.
The Global Video Measurement Alliance is a collaboration, so far, between the big publishers Buzzfeed, Group Nine and Vice with Tubular Labs, which tracks 5 billion online videos, 400 million consumers and 13 million creators, among other things.More publishers are expected to join as the collaboration continues.
In a release, the new alliance said, "By working directly with Tubular and creating GVMA standards together, VICE, BuzzFeed, Group Nine and additional publishers can empower brands to more fairly evaluate the true global reach and engagement of online video publishers and measure the ROI of their campaigns vis-à-vis the broader market."
Doing a better job consistently tracking and describing those audiences is a crucial issue for publishers. The GVMA is essentially trying to create a new rulebook for evaluating viewership, a business that's been famously fractured for years.
Though plenty of publishers have carved out huge audiences online, consistently generating revenues commensurate with those audiences has been more challenging. Indeed, Buzzfeed and Vice both have had layoffs and restructured some operations in the past few months.
At the same time, more questions have arisen about how Facebook in particular measures, and bills for, views of video and ads. Organic reach for posts there is virtually dead; it's now pay-to-play if a company wants its own posts to get seen. But paying someone else to get audiences to see your content is a tough way for a media company to make a living.
The result has been a lot of "inconsistency and confusion," said Tubular's co-founder and chief strategy officer, Allison Stern.
That market chaos impairs investment by marketers, and tends to concentrate online spending on only the very biggest platforms, which are seen as a safe (or safe enough) haven.
The GVMA's goal is to develop reliable, consistent metrics that actually capture engagement and connection. Ideally, that will provide brands and marketers with more confidence to invest in individual publishers, to reach their loyal, well defined audiences across the entire Internet, rather than just relying on Facebook and Google to say what's working.
"Starting last year, the industry really took a shift," said Stern. "It wasn't just about views, it was about building sustainable businesses. The time was right for making an alliance."
What's needed, Stern said, is a new set of metrics to "solve this existential measurement challenge."
Don't count on the statistical equivalent of the Lord of the Rings, with one stat to rule the rest. More likely is a new group of metrics that do a better at quantifying audiences, and tracking what they do on a site in ways that can lead to to useful business outcomes for both advertisers and publishers. Just tracking how many people logged in doesn't say very much about that audience, or its value to an advertiser.
"Usually, when something new gets developed, there's a certain excitement in the newness," Stern said. "The fact that you can say, 'Hey, we drove 1 billion views, 5 billion views.' But it's not what publishers need, it's not what brands need, to evaluate content."
The GVMA comes at a difficult time for many online publishers. They say they're looking to create even more content this year, without actually adding more resources to make that content, according to a recent Digiday survey.
About two in five publishers said they plan to keep spending flat or even cut it in 2019. Three in five said they plan to make more content. That doesn't quite add up. Investors and board members may like hearing "we'll do more with less," but it has significant limitations.
And it's not just online powerhouses such as Vice and Buzzfeed trying to shift the way they sell their wares. A new Poynter Institute survey suggests that newsrooms are finally focusing on "loyalty over pageviews,"along with suggestions on how to measure that loyalty.
As Poynter says, "...we need to lock on our analytics to the people who willfully return to our work. Loyal audiences are good for the impact of our journalism and for our ability to earn revenue from it."
Poynter's Ren LaForme points to the Center for Cooperative Media, which has launched a free audience explorer dashboardthat slices up the online audience, as gathered by Google Analytics, into "brand lovers," "prospective loyalists" and "casual"users.
Identifying and focusing on those loyal brand lovers is a Very Good Idea, one that some sites have been trying to pull off for a while. Pumping out more content without figuring out who's consuming it, and who is consistently coming back for more, is not.
If the GVMA figures out a better way to track those audiences, it'll be a win for the publishers and advertisers too. It might even be good news for readers, who could end up with more stable and sustainable favorite sites, and ads on those sites that are more consistently relevant to them.
