Commentary

What Is A Data-driven Publisher?

by Nina Lentini , Staff Writer @Nina_Lentini, October 4, 2019

Left to right: Moderator Scotty Reiss, founder, A Girl's Guide To Cars; Nicholas Butterworth, chief technology & product officer, Refinery29; Chris Park, director, revenue operations, Cheddar Inc., and Melanie Winer, VP, media strategy and client success, Insider.

Refinery29 is on many, many platforms -- each with its own set of metrics -- and they are ever-changing since they're all tech-driven companies. So it came up with what it calls The Audience Bible just to keep track of them.

Nicholas Butterworth, chief technology and product officer, shared that news at Thursday's Publishing Insider Summit in Austin.

As he said, the bible keeps track of "several hundred KPIs ..."

"Can you share that?" interjected Melanie Winer, VP, media strategy and client success for Insider (think Business Insider, Chocolate Insider).

"... for several hundred platforms ... n-n-n-o-o," said Butterworth, "but I can tell you how to do it."

"Yes!"

He explained the company bible shows, "These are the primary KPIs, secondary KPIs, here's what our projections are, our goals, here's what we track, here's what they mean, here's where we have demographic information, geographic information.

"We try to use that as a reference for marketers and sales people. Now, in practice, I'm not going to say that every salesperson always looks at The Audience Bible but we can say, well, here it is on page 22 -- and we update it quarterly.

"It really is a moving target. You can't go for a whole year with just one KPI set for one platform because they'll change it."