Use Your Users: Driving Online Media In 2010
In the beginning was the pageview and it was good. However, The Awl is reporting today that Gawker Media has decided to change how they measure their sites from pageviews to monthly uniques. The metric will hopefully give them, "a new number that more accurately reflects the growth of our audience." This change is relevant to all online media entrepreneurs and content creators for 2 reasons.
The first is that unique visitors as a statistic to sell advertisers represents something different than pageviews. In fact, it seems like a step backward. The original promise of online advertising was that for each ad impression, someone clicked to reach that page. One page, one impression, two eyeballs. However, as Nick "Pancake Man" Denton rightly points out, while the pageview might be the purest form of measuring eyes-on-page, focusing exclusively on pageviews incentives editors and content creators to squeeze increasing amounts of clicks from the existing user base. Using monthly uniques as the performance metric of choice allows you to represent the number of eyeballs your site has access to, a measurement more like TV's share of audience or newspaper circulation numbers. An increasing number of monthly uniques demonstrates to advertisers that passed links and breakout stories travel easily from your core audience to the wider web. This is prime bait for mainstream brands, who will always have the largest ad budgets.
The other important change at Gawker announced today that has relevance to anyone managing online content: a change in the way variable pay is distributed and therefore how content creators are incentivized. 
We Read The Morgan Stanley Mobile Internet Report So You Don't Have To
The research unit of US Investment Bank Morgan Stanley today released a triple threat evaluation of the mobile internet industry, including a 422-page report, 692-page presentation, and a 92-page "summary" of the aforementioned. There's just something about speculative research from financial institutions that seems so rational, pure, and free of the enthusiastic support that those in the industry like to give each other. The report starts by stating that we are in the early part of the fifth major technology cycle of the last fifty years, and that as each new cycle unfolds, "the number of devices and users rises by a factor of ten." It continues by stating, "the winners in each new innovation cycle create more market capitalization than the winners of the last cycle."
Given that positive outlook, lets take a look at how the rest of the report breaks down, and what it could mean for mobile internet entrepreneurs in Northern Europe.
