Podcasting Metrics Series Pt 6 | What Standards Should Podcasting Be Held To?
A little while back MasterMaq of the Podcast Spot podcast host added some interesting and relevant points about my podcasting metrics series. Specifically, he disagreed with the idea that podcasters should not have to provide complete download stats because this held us to a higher standard than newspaper and other such media. He states:
The way that magazines, television, radio, and other media sell advertising is flawed. Everything is based on assumptions…Podcasting doesn’t suffer from this problem. Podcasting needs to be stronger than other media….I think podcasters who wish to generate advertising revenue should provide as much data as possible.
His whole post is worth reading. In the end I think we all agree with the sentiments that he is sharing. However, I can see how things could be misconstrued from the earlier dialog around this series. I’m glad Maq brought these things up so we could talk about them more. So at this point I’d like to clarify my view on a few things:
- I don’t think podcasters should strive for mediocrity.
- I’m always for more targeted marketing and the metrics that allow for that. As you quoted, I want podcasters to have more sophisticated and metrics to accompany the downloads stats.
- I agree that podcasters should provide as much data as possible to advertisers.
- There are numerous benefits that podcasting provides that should be emphasized, quantified and qualified for advertisers.
- I would love for all podcasters to have as many metrics as possible including how many people actually listened to the content.
However, not everyone has access to complete download stats. Further, right now there is no practical technology in place for tracking listens.
Everyone talks about this fear that advertisers have of podcasting because of the lack of metrics. Well, they are already as good as (and better in some cases) than other media…as you have pointed out.
Podcasters shouldn’t let that hold them back (nor should advertisers). Even with only a count of unique downloads, you can give an advertiser an "order of magnitude" figure for your audience. I don’t want to hide anything from anyone, I just don’t want anyone to hold out unnecessarily.
If an advertiser is only paying you for complete downloads, they’re getting some of your listeners for free. Some of those partials are also people who heard and engaged with the content. If the ad is post-roll, that’s a different story.
Give advertisers both sets of downloads stats. But don’t let them undervalue what you have to offer. What is even more important than the listens or downloads is measuring response/results that are generated. We’ll get better as an industry at communicating this as time goes on.
Podcast Spot is working on a means for its users to track downloads.
December 21st, 2006 11:00
I Mack is correct in saying that podcasters have to provide the best quantitative data that they can. Also, I agree that podcasters have immediate access (generally) to better data than other media. Jason brings to light some problems that are real problems that I think everyone is trying to addrees now (i.e., listens and complete downloads).
I think there’s a more important point to consider in this discussion that I’m not seeing here. Podcasters can’t rely solely on numbers to attract advertisers. While there are a few general interest podcasts that draw (relatively) big numbers, the strength of podcasting is in attracting laser-targeted niche markets of common interest.
By relying strictly on numbers, you’re just playing the CPM game, which frankly, at least at this point, podcasters can’t compete with the other forms of mass media. Advertising buyers have a big budget to spend and a larget target to hit. Is their time (and client’s money) better spent with an ad buy on Entertainment Tonight or on thousands of podcasts that they have to separately negotiate with?
Generally speaking, the true value of podcasting is not in playing the CPM game. It’s in reaching a targeted audience of interest. It’s in saying to an electronics manufacturer, “My 10,000 listeners who are interested in high definition TVs and home theater equipment ARE your target market. Each impression is worth MORE than on the Entertainment Tonight buy, a percentage of whom are men, a percentage of whom are in a certain age range, a percentage of whom have a certain level of disposable income, a pecentage of whom have a big empty room in their homes, a percentage of whom are interested in building a home theater.”
Now you’ve truly stepped outside of the CPM model. Numbers still count — nobody’s going to buy a show with 9 listeners, but your relationship with your targeted audience, as a podcaster, becomes your biggest asset.
Getting this kind of qualitative data — that shows in hard numbers the connection between advertising to a niche podcast audience and the translation of that into sales or brand awareness or whatever the advertiser is focusing the campaign on — is the hard part that I think the whole industry needs to be focusing on.
To that end, there is a group that I’m involved with called the Open Metrics Initiative which aims to tackle these exact questions. You can read more about it at http://www.openmetrics.org. Lee Gibbons from Podango, another company involved in this initiative, was interviewed yesterday on http://podcasting.about.com about Open Metrics.
Sorry if this plug is too blatant, however, Open Metrics is an open consortium of interested parties, this isn’t a commercial venture, and it seems to be relevant to the discussion.
Dave Kawalec
Producer
Porter Novelli
*Cross-posting on blog.mastermaq.ca
December 21st, 2006 12:47
Thanks Dave for your input.
I’m very interested to see what the Open Metrics Initiative brings. I believe I linked to them in the first post or two of this series.
Also, I 100% agree with your comments about the importance of measuring and conveying qualitative data about the relationship you have with your audience. It’s in the queue to discuss it in this series.
I look forward to more of your input on the matter.
December 21st, 2006 16:14
Jason, thanks for revisiting this and making some very useful clarifications.
Dave, interesting thoughts about not playing the CPM game. I wonder though if we’ll ever get that kind of qualitative data reporting. It’s not that obtaining that kind of data is impossible, but I think the majority of podcasters (who want to make money) will end up joining some kind of a network to make it easier. The advertiser deals with the network, not the individual podcasters. I think the fact that podcasts can be very focused on a specific niche makes them valuable, I’m just not convinced yet that an advertiser is going to make the effort. Unless we had something like AdSense I guess.
As for Podcast Spot, we’ve set a tentative release date of January 10th for the big update that includes all the new stats features (including completed downloads).
December 22nd, 2006 12:52
Mack, from the agency perspective, it this idea — directly engaging with consumers — that gets advertisers excited about the medium. They will buy in on podcasting because of the access to the audience.
We (i.e., podcasters, podcast networks, and agency folks who “get it”) are making a claim to advertisers. We’re saying, “you’re getting something very valuable. You’re talking directly to your target market. Even though these impression numbers seem low, they are more valuable impressions.” It is therefore up to us to provide them with the data to back up this claim.
Right now, we’re all getting by on download metrics, a lot of buzz and anecdotal evidence of efficacy. And that has gotten alot of people onboard at least to try this whole podcasting thing out. But I think the days of the podcasting “stunt buy” (where an agency might take some very small piece of a huge ad budget to stick one toe into the podcasting ocean so their client can claim they are “doing podcasting”) are coming to an end. We’re entering a time when advertisers are going to start demanding better qualitative metrics (since our claim of higher value per impression is a qualitative one).
It won’t be anything as simple as AdSense, since there’s no trackable action directly associated with listening to the podcast. Back to the HDTV example, there’s no way to know how much listening to a podcast influenced my decision to purchase a certain product without asking me directly. This kind of information will require statistics derived from traditional survey methods.