Article: https://www.adweek.com/tv-video/engagement-once-gave-life-to-the-internet-now-its-killing-it/
Everyone is talking about engagement. How do we increase
engagement? How can we monetize engagement? This article goes into the pitfalls
of relying so heavily on engagement and how it affects digital marketing. For a
media company, the product is the audience, which is sold to advertisers. (audience
= impressions) And the audience’s behavior is set into metrics that can give
advertisers proof on why their site is the best idea for the brand and also how
much money something should cost. This is where engagement comes into play. Everyone
wants more engagement, and most sites optimize their content to gain the max clicks
and shares. But the “why” behind people reading or watching this content cannot
be tracked, so the value of this engagement isn’t taken into consideration. The
author recommends adding more nuance to KPIs to consider what the takeaways are
from engagement. He also talks about needing more than just engagement as the
absolute value, but the “nuances” mentioned that could add more value aren’t specified,
probably because there isn’t a way to track this right now. Hopefully in the
future, machine learning and big data will solve this issue. Advertisers will
have more faith in how digital marketing could increase their value and
actually get sentiment behind clicks and shares. But for right now, it’s all we
have to work with.
More companies are turning to subscription models, which we
see form the New York Times and the WSJ. Something that is clear with these two
businesses is that they cannot change their content to gain more clicks, likes
and shares. The ad world does not suit their needs, and now their revenue from
subscribers is at 60%. I also think this model proves more value to advertisers
since the intent of the audience is very clearly stated, and the paywall allows
for that kind of tracking. Either way, increased engagement is a goal for many,
but the way to get there as well as the value behind it is very fuzzy.
No comments:
Post a Comment