• More On The Audience Engagement Story
    On the publisher side, is there a value to trying to quantify engagement? At the recent eMetrics Summit in San Francisco, Gary Angel and Eric Peterson, two leading Web analytics experts, both wondered whether, from an advertising perspective, high engagement on a publisher site might indeed be a negative. The argument: If visitors are "too engaged" on a site, they might be less likely to leave to visit an advertiser's site. "You probably want visitors who are moderately engaged," Peterson said.
  • The Audience Engagement Story
    Recently some of the best thinking about engagement has been percolating in the Web analytics community. In addition to Eric Peterson's groundbreaking work in developing what I have called "The Peterson Model" as a way to capture a more fully developed idea of visitor engagement, over the past few months, Gary Angel of Semphonic has written five highly nuanced and evolving perspectives of engagement. And Young-Bean Song of Atlas has contributed, "Engagement Mapping," a white paper that shows ways that advertisers and publishers can begin to tell a more fully developed engagement story than the "Last Ad" measurement that gives …
  • Don't Be 'Hypenotized'
    If nothing else, the industry of online advertising and its ever-growing tentacles is interesting. So much news and innovation, though, is clouded by so much hype injected by press releases from those companies that benefit from the use of these publishing product extensions. As a publisher, it's hard to sift through it all -- and yet these headlines materially impact how you guide your internal resources. So for today's column, I thought I would fight the hype and provide my two cents on how or if you should spend time and money integrating the following products or services into your …
  • The Urge To Merge
    In the movie "You've Got Mail," Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) is an executive with the fictional FoxBooks bookstore chain. Its mission is to dominate the market and make the local neighborhood bookstore obsolete. This storyline is certainly not a new one, and it plays itself out in every line of business as companies compete for market share. Whether the method is driving competitors out of business or acquiring them, the result is the same: less competition.Over the past year, we've been watching a similar storyline playing out in the online ad network space.
  • Opening A Door You Can't Close
    Today's social networking executives seem hell-bent on making history repeat itself. MySpace, Google, Facebook and others are trying to "out open" each other by giving third-party developers access to their users, their platform, and their data. They are even coming together to join groups like OpenSocial to simplify data portability between platforms. But while opening your network may be popular in the media, it could have devastating results.
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