The session will review the basic terms and methodology of Web analytics but will also let people put their own Web reports into some context. To help with that we want to gather (anonymously) examples of a few key metrics from your web site. We don’t want names or any other identifying information and the only descriptions that will be used in the training will be generic such as “A 30,000 circ daily in the Northeast.”

If you complete the survey and provide your e-mail address, we’ll send you a promo code worth $10 off the Webinar. The code will be sent one month before the Webinar, so make sure you fill out the survey before then.

Thanks for the help and please leave a comment below if you have any questions or have additional data to share that might be useful in the training.

So in the short term some will get it wrong, possibly horribly wrong. But those paying attention to the fact that digital has changed our culture will hopefully get it right. And ‘right’ can include some level of subscription fees, the question being what cost, what content and what platforms.

But, the number one way to get it wrong is to believe that because content is expensive to produce, readers must and will subsidize its creation through subscription fees. Assuming you are entitled to be paid for something is not really a sound economic argument, especially in the face of an unlimited supply of information driving down the perceived value of your content.

I have not seen anyone map this on a simple supply/demand curve:

Disclaimer: the chart is for entertainment purposes. I am not an economist, not even on TV and the curves here are purely diagrammatic. If this was showing a real information demand curve the ‘supply’ line would be so far to the right as to be off the page bringing the quantity (Q1) with it and dropping the price equilibrium (P1) to zero.

Economics 101 is when supply increases prices decrease. In this case we could argue demand has also increased but not enough to match a limitless supply of information.

So what we have is an oversupply of information. Not news, not journalism necessarily, but information. And guess what, consumers are exhibiting a behavior that indicates 5.5 hours per day of ‘information’ on Facebook is at least a minimally acceptable substitute for paying for a daily newspaper or watching the evening news. If the news is important it will find them. Assuming there are any newspapers left to cover it.

I found the coincidence of timing, and the various pricing strategies interesting. Each paper structured their offers differently, but basically:

7-day subscription (5 for WSJ)
Union Leader – $2.25 /week
Boston Globe – $7.75 /week (12 week special)
New York Times – $7.40 /week
Wall Street Journal – $2.30 /week

Weekender
Union Leader – $2.00 /week (Thu-Sun)
New York Times  - $5.20 /week (Fri-Sun)

Sunday Only
Union Leader – $1.00 /week
Boston Globe – $2.50 /week (for $3.24 includes Globe Reader)

My flight back from Las Vegas this afternoon (Southwest 1159) was on one of the airline’s few planes that have WiFi hotspots. Apparently they are still testing out the system and it was free.

So – having a new iPhone, 5.5 hours of flight time and free Wifi – of course I had to check it out. First up was Qik:

http://qik.com/video/1880919

Not too thrilling – but my son did get to watch the live video for a while which was fun.

I also tested out Skype- which worked like a charm on my end – though Annette could not hear much over the engine noise. Need a noise-canceling mic apparently.

The VPN connection into my office network was no problem. More fun was the SimplifyMedia app for the iPhone – which let me stream my home iTunes library for awhile – till I decided to save my battery I can imagine the Slingbox app would be pretty cool as well.

In the end I spent a fair amount of time watching our flight progress on FlightExplorer.com mostly just to watch the weather we were routing around.

And of course, I had time to write a blog post…

I went from paying $14 to The Wall Street Journal to paying $10 to Amazon (for WSJ.com on the Kindle). Now the splits there, and I think this is relatively well known, are very, very much in favor of Amazon. So I became very much less valuable to The Wall Street Journal. That’s part one. Part two is they don’t know I exist. I went from being someone who’s their subscriber to being someone who is an Amazon subscriber, which The Wall Street Journal has no visibility back to and cannot manage that customer relationship. . . . So they’ve lost both the customer management and, trust me, the lion’s share of the economics.

So newspapers are mad at Google for creating an efficient distribution system that drives traffic back to them, but the same publishers are rushing to Amazon to give them 70% of the subscription revenue to get onto Kindle?

Google search = Merrimack bicycle shop Luckily for the owner that generic search is also the exact name of his store. Great SEO for someone who has been in business for 20 years.

First result = Google Maps Fair enough – I did search in Google. But, I wonder why we do not hear more concern about that? Local directories can be a significant source of newspaper.com revenue and here Google has gone and given itself the market. Business-wise that worries me more then them linking to us in Google News. Where is the moral outrage people?! WIN for Google.

Second and third results = Waymarking.com which appears to be a cycling enthusiasts site with reader contributed reviews. Interesting – unfortunately the location and photo in the listing is two locations ago. (The owner has moved several times in the past few years.) FAIL.

Fourth result = AOL.com The shop I was looking for was 9th on a list of apparently sponsored and featured links. At least it was listed – but unfortunately the location is a year out of date. FAIL.

Fifth result = Directory.NH.com (disclaimer: we own nh.com) This is the first genuinely ‘local’ result on the page. The Telegraph has actual real live people who maintain the site, update phone numbers and addresses, sell enhanced listings and so on. And of course the info is accurate in this case! WIN for NH.com

Results six though 100 (no I did not look at every one) seem to be the usual mix of empty SEO-grabbing directories with a few reader contributed sites in the mix. Almost none of them had the correct address (416 DW Highway) and none I saw had anything approximating business hours. Overall Web FAIL.

So, I guess the question is really about Google. How useful are it’s vaunted algorithms when dealing at the local level? Yes, Google itself got the listing correct – and that should be a concern. But, 99% of the rest of the results were garbage and there was really no way to judge right from wrong, good from bad.

PageRank works wonders on non-geographic-relevant content. When I want to know the name of the character actor in the episode of STNG that is on right now (Ray Wise) I really do want to see the result that the greatest number of people found relevant.

But, when I am searching for the address of a local business I want to see the result that has the most authority. In this case accuracy is not a popularity contest.

This would seem to be a kink in the armor and we see the same problem in Google News. Large media sites get a high ranking for nothing more than reprinting an AP pick-up of a ‘local’ story. Meanwhile the source newspaper that is providing updates, context, documents and maybe multimedia is stuck lower in the results.

If newspaper executives want to make a career out of bashing Google for having a popular product – they should at least frame the argument in reality. The problem is not that Google indexes our stories and content – it is that really they don’t do such a great job in providing ‘credit’ to the local sources that are likely to also be the most authoritative.

Google News itself is an attempt to remedy this problem. By segmenting and indexing media outlets the results can be assumed to be more recent and more relevant then a random search of the entire Web. But, as with directory listings the system still breaks down at the hyper-local level.

Newspapers should be going after Google to make their searches (for news and business directories especially) more geo-friendly. Just add source location as a factor in the PageRank calculation and see if we can not start driving traffic to the sources that are actually paying to create the content in the first place.

Typical enough – but what was interesting was watching the traffic (via bit.ly):

I have noted on the chart the timing of each re-tweet (red) and, perhaps more importantly, the actual conversions of clicks to survey responses (green). In the first hour the survey received five re-tweets, 110 referrals from Twitter, and four people actually completed the survey.

You can check out the raw data here http://bit.ly/info/oju

Apparently there are some crossed lines at AP. It is a big company so not a surprise that mistakes happen. But, they look pretty silly when a regional AP rep asks an affiliate radio station to remove similar videos from their site. Especially when the videos were embedded from the official AP YouTube Channel.

Does AP know how its YouTube channel works? (CNet News)

I am working on a small research project that hopefully will turn into a case study and presentation at Poynter later this summer. The working title is: ’10 Things You Can do for Free Today.’

The project involves identifying 15 – 20 of the top ‘free’ tools being used on newspaper Web sites and then building short case study for each focused on ease of installation, use, successes and best practices. The tools most commonly mentioned so far range from Coveritlive to Qik.

If you are interested in helping out just answer a few quick questions here: Web Tools Survey

Thanks!

Great quote and great presentation from Chuck: