Enreach Gives New Powerful Tools For Advertisers And Media
Enreach is a new Finnish startup that has been founded by Kimmo Kiviluoto and Brian Jacobs. Kimmo Kiviluoto is the former CEO and co-founder of another data crunching startup X-tract. Enreach has a good amount of talent and understanding of the online behavior of consumers and the media business. They're also putting this into use in their offering. Enreach in short is giving premium publishers a way to better understand their audiences and then use this to target ads for better monetisation.
The Sausage Factory: How The Internet Broke Mainstream Media And Why That's Actually A Bad Thing
Since the dawn of man, when we first started walking upright, humans have been curious about the world around them. This desire to understand, to learn, drove explorers to visit new lands, the invention of novel ways to communicate across vast distances, and more recently, during the past few centuries, it gave birth to the news industry. Before the internet the only way to find out about what was going on in your little town was to ask around or pick up a copy of the local newspaper. Then radio and television came along, and that too helped people make better use of the city that they called home. With the internet however, we broke all that. The "global village" was created, was then hyped in the late 90s, crashed miserably, and from the ashes rose the "web 2.0" culture where everyone was told that what they have to say is important, critical in fact, to the future success of the medium. That unhealthy attitude ruined the way we consume and create news.
Is There An Online Future For Old Media?
The two big Finnish “old media” companies, Sanoma and Alma Media, published their 2009 results yesterday and today, respectively. However, as seems to be the common policy, neither of them was too open about the state of their online business. But luckily Alma still offered some nuggets of information for constructing a picture of what’s going on.
The two online legs of an old media company are typically classifieds and editorially driven news sites. Alma’s classifieds segment, which includes such assets as the housing site Etuovi.com and jobs site Monster.fi, posted a loss of €0.7m with an €27m revenue. Sanoma doesn’t give out any information on its online classifieds.
On the online news side, Alma publishes Iltalehti.fi, the biggest website in Finland by unique visitors. Although the full year figures for the asset were not disclosed today, the Q1/09 report from April states a revenue of €1.2m, so the annual income is likely to be around the €5m mark. Given that Iltalehti.fi relies mainly on journalistic content, the site is – after full allocation of editorial costs – most likely loss-making or, if they’re lucky, posting a very small profit.
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. 
