danielknox.net

Interesting that the top two online retailers in the Foresee Online Retail Satisfaction Index (Netflix & Amazon) are the ‘poster children’ for e-commerce personalization. Would be worth investigating how many of the top 100 have implemented some form of personalized recommendations on their sites to see if this is indicative of a larger trend.

I gained some insight today into why (at least for me) Google Reader’s “selected just for you” recommendations suck (see previous rant here).

In a paper presented at the IUI ‘10 Conference a group of Google researchers discuss different recommendation algorithms they have tested on Google News. They outline some of the problems with their default ‘personalization’ method (which relies on collaborative filtering), including the inability to recommend new stories and the inability to account for variability between users leading to “recommendation convergence” (this is my term, not the researchers’, but I think its appropriate). For instance, they observed:

… that entertainment news stories are constantly recommended to most of the users, even for those users who never clicked on entertainment stories. The reason is the entertainment news stories are generally very popular, thus there are always enough clicks on entertainment stories from a user’s “neighbors” to make the recommendation.

I assume that Google Reader is also using a collaborative filtering method to recommend articles “just for me” since the recommendation convergence issue would definitely explain why all I seem to get recommended are humorous (and presumably popular) videos.

I can only hope that the hybrid approach that was tested on Google News (and which performed 30%+ better than collaborative filtering) will be rolled out to Google Reader as well. Until then I’ll have to put up with clips “selected just for me” (and thousands / millions of other people ‘just like me’) like a lightning blot striking a plane, a baseball player jumping over the catcher and a young girl doing a trick on a bicycle (actually that last one is pretty cool!).

I spent some time last night playing with the various News apps for the iPad.

As of last night there were 77 apps in the News category (see table).


Although it is currently the smallest grouping (although I doubt that will last long), the best apps in terms of design and functionality are in the mainstream media grouping (particularly the awesome Reuters app).

Note: the above excludes other ‘news’ apps that because of their focus are not listed in the News category (e.g. Bloomberg, ESPN).

comScore’s Digital Year in Review 2009 reports that U.S. consumers viewed 4.3 trillion online display advertisements, including static and rich media ads, during 2009 (as measured by comScore’s Ad Metrix system). This represents a 21% increase over 2008, driven by increases in both the number of people exposed to display ads online (+8%) and the average ad frequency (+12%). What I found interesting about these stats is that the top 10 publishers (shown above) accounted for 1.8 trillion (or 42%), with the thousands upon thousands of other publishers, including all the major newspaper brands (Gannett, Hearst, NYT, Tribune etc), accounting for just 58%.

Eric T. Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified released a white paper today foreshadowing a ‘coming revolution in web analytics’.

Peterson believes we are on the verge of seeing “third-generation digital analytics tools” that will provide greater insights and opportunities by bridging the gap between offline data (such as market research) and online data.

This white paper describes the impending revolution in digital analytics, one that has the potential to change both the web analytics and business intelligence fields forever.  We make the case for a new approach towards customer intelligence that leverages all available data, not just that data which is most convenient given the available tools.  We make this case not because we believe there is anything wrong with today’s tools when used appropriately, but because we believe digital analytics should take a greater role in business decision making in the future.

Peterson also believes that first- and second-generation digital analytics tools have failed to live up to expectations in part because companies thought that the tools themselves would lead to meaningful and actionable insights, and as a consequence failed to invest in the resources (aka analysts) that actually create insights out of the data collected by the tools. This is consistent with web analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik whose 10 / 90 Rule advocates spending 9 times more on resources to extract value from web analytics data than on the tools that collect the data.

This raises the question of whether paying for web analytics tools that collect web data will be a casualty of Peterson’s ‘revolution’. Companies who pay for their web analytics solutions are already the minority (this is true even for large enterprises: study finds only 33% of large enterprises pay for web analytics technologies), and of those who do pay for web analytics tools, most are considering displacing them with a free alternative. A primary motivation? Freeing up resources so they can invest more in the people necessary to drive insight rather than the technology used to collect and analyze data.

Seems like this ‘coming revolution’ will be good news for people with the skills to turn data into insights, and bad news for companies who have built their businesses on charging for collecting data.

Next New Networks published some interesting data last week about viewership to their family of online video channels, which include Indy Mogul, Barely Digital (home of Obama Girl) and new addition Hungry Nation. The study, conducted with the help of web video measurement firm Visible Measures, showed that the peak period for video viewership was the six hours between 12pm ET to 3pm PT, when many North Americans are presumably looking for a short distraction from work.

[caption id=”attachment_32” align=”alignnone” width=”481” caption=”Source: Visible Measures via Silicon Alley Insider”][/caption]

This trend is hardly surprising given the type of content that Next New Networks specializes in…. short-form entertainment videos. I recall from my time at Channel 4 that short-form videos were popular during the day and long-form videos were popular during the evening (and I bet if you looked at data for Hulu you’d see a similar trend).

By contrast, the general trend for most online news sites is still a morning peak (for instance, DailyMe.com has a readership peak most days between 7am ET and 10am PT). However, I suspect this general trend masks differences between different types of content on online news sites, some of which may provide a similar lunchtime ‘outlet’ to the Next New Networks videos. Newstogram, our soon-to-launch analytics / intelligence platform, will provide an easy way for online news sites to drill down and find the popularity of different categories, topics, people etc. throughout the day in order to identify the types of content where Lunchtime is the new Primetime.

Just noticed on Quantcast that visitors to Daylife.com have fallen 66% in the last year….

Glam.com is the proto-type for a distributed content ad network. This chart is complex so bare with me. The two large circles actually have no relationship to the graph underneath them. The circles represent the total traffic to the Glam network and the destination site iVillage. The yellow circles show content the sites produce themselves. The purple circles are content they link to. Glam’s strategy is to invite bloggers to become a part of their network. Bloggers apply, Glam evaluates them and if approved, begins linking to that blog and selling advertising onto it. This strategy enabled Glam to grow their traffic at an exponential rate, eclipsing the established iVillage in less then 2 years. iVillage is suffering. The president of NBC, which owns iVillage recently stated publically that he regrets the purchase of that site. It serves as a warning of the consequences of being closed in a Media 2.0 economy.

A recent study by Belden Interactive identified a group of users of online news sites called “core loyalists” who who visit a news site an average of 18 days a month and contribute 85% of the pageviews and user sessions.

The study suggests that this group may value online news content enough to pay for it, but, as a “core loyalist”, I don’t think that is necessarily the case.

PoynterOnline has the full write-up.