State of Local

It’s important to be able to accurately judge the reach of a local news site. It’s not just the page views or unique monthly visits. It’s how vital the site is to its core users. Does it have value to advertisers? Is it a factor in the blogosphere?

When you travel into an examination of those metrics, you can rapidly find yourself getting into trouble. What seems to be accurate numbers can often be skewed, or wildly misinterpreted if you don’t pay attention to where those numbers come from and how they are compiled.

Uber-media blogger Jeff Jarvis recently took a swing at using new metrics to measure the popularity and effectiveness of the leading Democratic presidential candidates. While that might not seem like a “local news” issue, the post illustrates some of the problems all of us run into when looking at metrics such as Google searches or YouTube video view numbers.

Google searches: Here, in a chart representing December 2007 in the U.S., we see Clinton generally ahead of Obama but with her falling and then showing a resurgence. What do searches indicate? I think they can at least measure interest if not affection or affiliation.

The problem with examining search numbers is that there’s no way of determining what people are looking for and why. Someone searching for “way to volunteer for Hillary Clinton” gets lumped into the same category as someone looking for dirt on her personal life. It’s impossible to draw any sort of conclusion about what this means.

You also run into this problem in a lot of local news stories when a reporter will punch a name or phrase into Google, and then add a line to their story about how many millions of results came back from the search. The problem with that is pretty straightforward. It’s a very raw estimate, which includes a lot of extraneous information. Search for “Rick Ellis” in Google, and you won’t just get the results from everyone with my name, you’ll also get results from anything that mentions either my first or last name. It’s a bogus number, and you should never use it as a way source in a story.

Video traffic: TubeMogul adds up YouTube views and shows Obama way ahead with 9.5m vs. 4.6m for Clinton and 4.5m for Edwards (on the GOP, Ron Paul beats them all with 10.5m followed by Huckabee with 4.8m — a surprise to me — Romney with 3.8m, Giuliani with 1.8m, and McCain with 1.2m)

YouTube video views is also a number you see used a lot in news stories. The problem is that the numbers can be manipulated reasonably easy. I won’t get into the specifics here, but a quick search online can lead you to a number of suggested methods. While YouTube video numbers are interesting, you should never take them as an accurate reflection of popularity.

There are similar problems with numbers from Alexa, Technorati or other sources of new metrics. Traditional measurements services have their own issues, and most of those are well-known inside the world of online journalism. But these new metrics are often taken at face value, which is a big mistake if you’re attempting to accurately measure reach or influence.

In the end, the best way to use these numbers is as part of a larger picture. Take the numbers from your internal logs, and track the number reported by comScore or Nielsen-NetRatings. Regularly watch other sources, and use everything to build a more complete picture of your reach and what you strengths and weaknesses are each month. It is a complex issue, and it’s sometimes a challenge to explain to other decision makers in your organization. But if you build a strong enough metrics model, you can adjust your coverage and promotional efforts day-to-day. That gives you an immense advantage over competitors who just look at the total pageview number each day and plan their business models accordingly.