Biz Dev in NYC by Rob Tsai

Hooman Radfar poses this question in response to Keith Teare’s follow-up post on Fred Wilson’s discussion of this “De-portalization” trend:

If you buy the atomization of the web bit, then you are probably on board with the concurrent theme being propagated around the blogosphere - the death of the page view. Folks like Evan Williams, Fred Wilson, Steve Rubel, Michael Parekh, Om Malik, and Jeff Jarvis all agree that existing metrics no longer cut it… What metrics will make the cut in this brave new world? …  I am sure that - in addition to the folks above - widget fiends like Derek, Lawrence, Tim, Ivan, Dare, Rob [thanks for the shout out, Hooman!], Niall, and - of course - ninja widget creators have some ideas.

Flow Metrics vs. Snapshot Metrics

First off, I would divide the metrics world into two worlds - 1) flow metrics and 2) snapshot metrics.   For example, financial statements can be categorized into income statement metrics like revenue and profits (which measure flows over a period of time) and balance sheet metrics like assets and liabilties (which measure the state of a business at a given point in time).  As any good financial analyst will tell you - an income statement without a balance sheet is meaningless, just as a balance sheet without an income statement is equally worthless.  (Yes, we should care about the cash flow statement and footnotes, but that’s another story).

Search engines have largely solved the problem of snapshot metrics, through their use of crawlers to count backlinks to a given site, and weighing those links to come up with rankings of a site’s authority. Flow metrics are a bit harder to measure.  Firms like Hitwise measure traffic by signing deals with the Internet Service Providers to have access to the traffic data of the ISP’s customers (with privacy protections so user names are not disclosed).  They measure flow metrics such as what sites were visited over a period of time, what sites originated traffic for other sites over a period of time, etc.   Amazon’s Alexa service provides traffic data through an opt-in plug-in that users download onto their computer that sends that user’s traffic data to Alexa, and Alexa can aggregate and provide similar flow metrics that measure the popularity of a given site based on the traffic patterns of its user community.

Widget Metrics

When it comes to measuring widget metrics for industries like the music industry, it’s clear that both flow metrics and snapshot metrics are meaningful. 

Let’s take the example of a person (like me) who thinks the movie Just Friends is pretty hilarious, especially Ryan Reynolds’ rendition of All 4 One’s classic “I Swear”, and embeds a video snippet widget on his blog.

If I were the copyright owner of this movie, especially if this widget were released during the movie’s theatrical run or initial DVD release, I’d certainly be interested in monitoring the flow and snapshot metrics of widgets like this.

Widget views (flow metric) are already being reported by YouTube - in this case, it’s about 42,000 views for this widget, at this writing. 

Widget embeds (snapshot metric) are currently not reported by YouTube, though I think it wouldn’t be too hard for YouTube to report this metric as well.  A third party widget search engine could probably provide this data as well, something I addressed in a post in July 2006.   I suspect there is a strong correlation between the amount of widget embeds and the amount of widget views.

The Widget Advertising Model

As the advertising model for widgets gets flushed out - whether it’s pre-roll, mid-roll, or post-roll ads or sponsored links or logos on a widget’s skin - other parties (aside from the original content owners) start to care about the flow metrics. 

Though it’s easy to see that advertisers care about the flow metrics such as how many times their ad or logo was viewed, I wonder if they care about the snapshot metrics.  In other words, where in the web were these widgets (and their ads) being displayed?  Is a widget view worth the same if it is shown on the YouTube portal page, versus my blog? 

I’d argue that for YouTube, a view is a view, because the video requires user engagement to launch the video (i.e. you have to click on the play button).  Similarly, AJAX widgets like Google map mashups that refresh when a users’ mouse hovers over points of interest also similarly require user engagement.

Nonetheless, brand marketers are VERY protective of their brands, and are always on their guard against advertising that devalues their brand.  So widgets that somehow get deployed on porn sites, or racist blogs, would not be a good thing, and the widget advertising model needs to come up with a solution to prevent these types of occurences.