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After seeing why the number of contributions does not prove the relevance of an author, let us now take a look at the audience.
Among the methods for measuring the relevance of a blog, the audience is often used.
On a community website (eg a forum where several members can write) the number of times an article has been read can be displayed in the pages. This helps the reader classify the contributions of the authors among each other.
If we want to compare the full site to other sites, we will use classical audience measurement tool (Xiti, Weborama, etc.) or specific ones for blogs (Feedburner, or Technorati, which main function is not audience measurement). We naturally tend to choose the blog that has the highest audience on the chosen topic. What do we have in mind when we choose the blog with the highest audience?
One think that a website that succeeds to attract many visitors should be interesting. Behind this assumption, there is an hypothesis: readers don’t read mediocre content. Yeah, right…
No, the audience does not provide a metrics for relevance. At most, a measure of interest. And that interest depends on too many parameters to be truly usable. All blog managers know it, if you write a paper entitled "the girl of the ad Alice naked", you may see audience of your blog soar. By the way, I am curious to see how far this blog will benefit from those few magic words. What kind of audience is this going to bring to visit this website? Experts in marketing communities? I doubt it. An audience made of disappointed males, which did not even read the article (one second is sufficient to establish the absence of pictures). And so a audience that will make the average time spent on this site drop. Because there is an immutable law of audience: the time spent on the website is inversely proportional to the effort made to recruit visitors. In other words, the more you force people to come to a website, the quicker they will leave it.
This can be seen on many sites with a captive audience. MSN has benefited from the default page of Internet Explorer on PCs. At the time when I was studying the behavior of Internet users, it as obvious: a majority of visitors to MSN only remained a few seconds. The time to type the url or find the bookmark page they really wanted to visit ... And I have not even mention advertising. Getting visitors through an advertising campaign is the same: the audience grows, but this does not tell us anything about the interest of the website. Last, the audience suffers from a major bias: it is very dependent on the age of the content. In fact, the older the content, the higher its audience. Because it takes time to be visited many times. The website can show the audience of the last month, or the last day. But this choice is left to the decision of the webmaster. And then it is difficult to compare sites whose audiences are measured differently. Is it natural to refer to the audience?
It is true, when you run a search on Google, the result does not show the pages that have the largest audience, but the pages found by a complex algorithm that aims to make us find the most relevant pages. So why does Google leave room for alternatives solutions, dedicated to communities?
To be continued …
On a community website (eg a forum where several members can write) the number of times an article has been read can be displayed in the pages. This helps the reader classify the contributions of the authors among each other.
If we want to compare the full site to other sites, we will use classical audience measurement tool (Xiti, Weborama, etc.) or specific ones for blogs (Feedburner, or Technorati, which main function is not audience measurement). We naturally tend to choose the blog that has the highest audience on the chosen topic. What do we have in mind when we choose the blog with the highest audience?
One think that a website that succeeds to attract many visitors should be interesting. Behind this assumption, there is an hypothesis: readers don’t read mediocre content. Yeah, right…
No, the audience does not provide a metrics for relevance. At most, a measure of interest. And that interest depends on too many parameters to be truly usable. All blog managers know it, if you write a paper entitled "the girl of the ad Alice naked", you may see audience of your blog soar. By the way, I am curious to see how far this blog will benefit from those few magic words. What kind of audience is this going to bring to visit this website? Experts in marketing communities? I doubt it. An audience made of disappointed males, which did not even read the article (one second is sufficient to establish the absence of pictures). And so a audience that will make the average time spent on this site drop. Because there is an immutable law of audience: the time spent on the website is inversely proportional to the effort made to recruit visitors. In other words, the more you force people to come to a website, the quicker they will leave it.
This can be seen on many sites with a captive audience. MSN has benefited from the default page of Internet Explorer on PCs. At the time when I was studying the behavior of Internet users, it as obvious: a majority of visitors to MSN only remained a few seconds. The time to type the url or find the bookmark page they really wanted to visit ... And I have not even mention advertising. Getting visitors through an advertising campaign is the same: the audience grows, but this does not tell us anything about the interest of the website. Last, the audience suffers from a major bias: it is very dependent on the age of the content. In fact, the older the content, the higher its audience. Because it takes time to be visited many times. The website can show the audience of the last month, or the last day. But this choice is left to the decision of the webmaster. And then it is difficult to compare sites whose audiences are measured differently. Is it natural to refer to the audience?
It is true, when you run a search on Google, the result does not show the pages that have the largest audience, but the pages found by a complex algorithm that aims to make us find the most relevant pages. So why does Google leave room for alternatives solutions, dedicated to communities?
To be continued …