Their content is unrivalled, although you really need to be aware of their biases. But I don't feel they try to hide them, rather the opposite.
However, with so few global sources of information, like The Economist, that do a good job, aren't we in danger of quite a narrow understanding of what is going on?
I think the Guardian Weekly is an interesting counterpoint, but it isn't avaiable on digital afaik. Are ther other weekly news magazines that reaches the Economists editorial quality?
It can be very lucrative if you get a following. I've seen sites charging four or five figure annual subscription fees for something that probably only takes a day or two a week to put together.
So IMV the Econo is really just industrialising that model, with some extra journo-fluff for credibility.
It's completely different to being a mainstream headline newsie like The Guardian, with a fundamentally different reader focus.
You're not selling news, you're selling the suggestion that you're on the inside track, with access to the thoughts and beliefs of people who make policy and move markets.
I subscribe and would probably continue to subscribe if they jacked up their rates to $200/yr.
I suspect that Facebook becomes the real winner in this due to the fact that no one uses the site without logging in, has provided enormous amounts of targeting info, and with Facebook controlling the ad experience they cut out the likes of Doubleclick and deal directly with the advertisers. They're vouching for the legitimacy of the ad performance metrics and handling the targeting internally using their own data, and so will be able to command a huge premium. A few years ago I would've laughed at the idea that Facebook would be able to compete with Google in the ad revenue market, but I'm not laughing now.
Didn't realize that ad block was that popular with millennials. I was always thought it was more popular with those that were tech savvy regardless of age.
I think he’s slightly underestimating or misunderstanding the “VC backed frivolousness” though. No one knew that a search engine could generate 20-30bn p/a in advertising revenue until it did. Even Facebook, taking their advertising “stock” into a more mature existing market didn’t know what it was worth in advance. No one knew that TV advertising would be worth what it is/was until the American’s ‘National Brands’ complex matured. It was all nearly impossible to estimate beforehand.
So… I think VC’s are making some sort of a bet that news = attention = advertising revenue. It’s vague, but that’s to be expected. It’s also not an arbitrary connection being made between media and software. The economic difference between Gangnam Style and Charlie Bit Me is that Psy has something to sell that is valuable once recognizable enough. The exchange rate for popularity to money is fairly arbitrary and difficult to determine in advance.
In any case, I think they as a business are doing the right thing. We need companies doing their job for the most part. 5% chance at a 20X return can’t be the way everyone does business.
OTOH, I’m not sure that journalistically The Economist really does do some difficult task that no one else can do. I mean, the difficult part is investigative journalism is it not? Otherwise, it’s just writers clarifying and putting their own perspective on existing work. It’s investigative in the sense that they talk to experts, I suppose. But, I still get the feeling they’re in the section of the complex which is most easy to solve.
Right now you can read the economist and get up to speed on Yemen, The Iran Deal, British Elections, and various smaller topics in the same economist style. They are not in the business of exploring and upsetting and revealing. I’m not worried that this kind of reporting is something we’ll lack for.
Anyway, one of the things that did impress me is a lack of a common Old News complaint that people should pay for journalism, that it should be funded somehow and that things are not allowed to change in ways that jeopardise the way they do things. I spoke to a journalist recently that was all complaints about how no one wants to pay for news anymore.
Edit: downvoters please explain reasons.
My argument is that I'm trying to make what is essentially a micro-payment for good quality writing delivered using a universal protocol (e-mail).
As a Facebook user, companies are spending money to show me targeted ads, but I never see them. No doubt this decreases their ROI.
Perhaps, but a major part of Facebook's business model is organic advertisement (pay-for-reach posts) which won't be affected by ad blockers. AFAICT as a user, that's an increasingly important part of Facebook.
Viewability measurement is in its infancy, and still has many issues. That said, it is fast becoming a standard measure, and any savvy display advertiser will be using it. At the end of the day, the ones most at risk are brand advertisers who aren't running direct response campaigns. They may have ad recall studies and Marketing Mix Modeling setups that give them some visibility, but there will always be some inventory wasted at the scale those advertisers are dealing with.
For direct response advertisers, things are getting better. While it may be harder to target some segments, and that % may be growing, the tools advertisers have available to them simply did not exist even a few years ago.
Take for example Google Analytics attribution and multi-channel reports. They have made a basic cross-channel attribution toolset available. To everyone. For free. Think about where the industry was even five years ago and let the impact of that sink in.
Facebook's acquisition of Atlas, Google's acquisition of Adometry, and other recent acquisitions in the bid management/dedicated attribution platform space are all pointing in one direction: better visibility into the contribution of your individual efforts.
I manage digital advertising for a living and have done so both client-side and at a top agency in the space. When it comes to the space, and in my not-so-humble opinion, the #1 thing clients wanted (and that I want doubly so now that I'm client-side) is better attribution.
When you are sitting on the types of data FB and Google are, you have many pieces of that puzzle, particularly the cross-channel and cross-device pieces. You also have the statistician brainpower and engineering talent to create the modeling tools that can give this visibility to advertisers. Why they haven't pushed harder on making that data visible is anyone's guess (I do wonder about how any negative revelations might impact their business), but the acquisitions seem like a big step in the right direction.
That said, digital media needs to go beyond static attribution models like: linear decay, time decay, U-shaped, first touch, last touch, etc. Instead, it needs to move more to the dynamic models, where data is assessed at the individual conversion path level. When you look at attribution at the channel or even campaign level, you are missing a ton of the story since the impact of say, a generic video ad vs. a laser-targeted retargeting ad can be night and day. Sure you might want to see channel data in aggregate, but you can't effectively optimize much at that level.
The advertising bubble savvy individuals in this industry are aware of those is video advertising. There's been a big hype train, CPMs are frothy, and everyone is switching to some sort of auto-play/auto-play-next-video format. Personally, I'm not convinced the value is really there at many of these CPMs, but I test and let the data decide.
The best thing companies like Google and Facebook can do to safeguard against any growing mistrust of online advertising efficacy is to keep improving their attribution tools, particularly for display and view-through performance.
Knowing what I do about the data available to me and its strengths/weaknesses I sometimes wish I was back in the days of last-touch models. There's few things as painful for me as knowing that better data exists to optimize against, but not having all the tools I need to get it because they are prohibitively expensive still for many budgets.
And if you really want to listen to music undisturbed, why not get a Spotify subscription?
16-24: 34%
25-34: 32%
35-44: 26%
45-64: 22%
55-64: 18%
Are ads annoying - sure. But so are paywalls, so are websites that are entirely VC funded and desperately growth hacking until they can sell out to a bigger company.
The web is an expensive thing, very expensive. By not blocking ads I'm doing my bit to help fund it. I see ad blocking as a lot like piracy: understandable in some cases, but still basically freeloading on those of us who support the creation of the content.
I would use a different word here, but I love her spirit!
It's a reasonable point that The Economist isn't really in the business of breaking news. I had never really thought about it but you're right. I'm sure they wouldn't be opposed to doing so but it's not their focus. (Not that deep investigative stories form a large part of any magazine's or newspaper's focus.)
However, the breadth of what The Economist covers and its very solid writing is--in the aggregate--pretty hard to emulate. It's hard in the sense that you need to pay for a lot of experienced journalists and editors who write well. Individual stories and columns aren't hard but the whole weekly package is. You could probably say the same thing about The Wall Street Journal for that matter.
One can be done from your office at the university, perhaps making extensive use of skype and good contacts.
I have no problem with the economist, I read it. I just don't expect that this kind of writing will be in danger, regardless of the business environment.
I think his twitter feed @tomstandage is very interesting. He's kind of the cool uncle who knows about lots of fun things going on. He's written a number of books like "History of the Worlds in 6 glasses", which I enjoyed.
http://www.amazon.com/Tom-Standage/e/B001H6N3PK/
He plays the drums, and he is (or at least was the last time I checked) in charge of the "back half" of the Economist. (The part after the news.)
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Nineteen...
[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Turk-Eighteenth-Century-Chess-Play...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/The-Neptune-File-Astronomical-Pioneers...
They get people to pay for it, which is where others seem to fail.
How much that reflects Germanic vs Anglo views of the world, I don't know. But having read articles in Der Spiegel very occasionally, it gave me a pretty different vibe.
There is a lot of doubt around the contribution of display, and video as well. By helping arm advertisers with more data/tools to help them understand the impact of the efforts (and optimize against that), they further prove the value of their channel. This would likely help grow revenue as the value becomes better understood. Depending on what that value ends up being, it may even grow margins if they can command higher CPMs as a result.
I've seen you post before, so I know you have a solid understanding of the limitations of the data currently available. I want to be clear that I'm not asking them for a silver bullet. There will always be a need to analyze performance, view the data through the lenses of different models, and apply your own judgement.
But there is most certainly some low hanging fruit that would be a step in the right direction. Let's take the AdWords platform (not using any bid management platform) for example. Off the top of my head some improvements Google could make there would be:
- Making view-through revenue data available within the UI. If I have a conversion tag placed and am passing in revenue, Google has this data. Why they can't display it when they can display VTs is still a mystery to me.
- Search Funnel reports are a nice start with their attribution and path analysis tools. However the fact that they don't have display campaigns in these reports is a real limited. I know you can now get a lot of that in GA, but many advertisers don't have that setup properly, and doing anything at scale in GA these days is a PITA with their reduced sampling threshold.
- Google has the path data, yet for some reason it is still not exposed in the main UI outside of "assisted" metrics. Good luck digging into that data at granular levels as well if you have multiple conversion goals. Custom columns are a start, but they don't go down to the keyword/ad level yet and are still quite limited.
- Google pushes video ads hard, yet the Video Advertising product is for all intents and purposes a separate product. Sure it shares a similar design, but most of your data is siloed from AdWords (with the exception of audience lists).
I could go on, but these highlight some areas where they could do more to prove the value of their offering. When you throw the capabilities of a platform like Adometry into the mix, I'll bet they could throw a LOT more meaningful data at advertisers. Why shouldn't I, as a customer spending large sums of money with them every month, expect access to these capabilities to get the most out of their product?
I realize your point was that they can provide some data, but decisions still fall on me. That is valid, but there's still a lot more they could do to help inform those decisions with what they have available.
That said, for kicks I looked through The Economist's media directory and it is indeed pretty London-centric. While I have no doubt that its correspondents are quite knowledgable about their beats (and I assume have plenty of good contacts), it's not like The Economist has a lot of big foreign bureaus.
If that market implodes, it's going to be... interesting.
A HUGE amount of the "free" services and content that pretty much all of us take so much for granted around the web are directly or indirectly supported by online advertising. Take that away and, as you say, it will be interesting.
What free services am I going to miss?
Yes. A very big one.