ChasNote

In the cartoon version of the social news war, Reddit is kicking Digg’s butt. (On a planet closer to home, the Comscore version puts Digg in the lead by a big margin.)

Give us back our algorithm, you scary Reddit guys!

From the LA Times piece on Digg’s Digg Ads platform, as well as ad systems on Reddit, Facebook and others that allow readers to voice real-time feedback on the advertising.

“The Internet has long provided a measurement of how effective an ad is — that is how many times it was clicked versus how often it was shown, a metric called click-through rate. But that’s based simply on how loud and flashy a banner can be in order to attract a reader’s attention.

“A click doesn’t necessarily convert to a purchase, or ‘conversion’ as they call it, nor are visitors guaranteed to associate the product positively. If an ad mimics a virus alert, it might get clicked out of fear or urgency but won’t elicit a pleasant reaction once users realize they were duped.”

Exactly. Click-through rate is a blunt instrument and neglects the quality of those clicks. A dozen clicks by high-value customers who want to engage with your brand, product offers or retail partners are much more valuable than a hundred clicks by individuals who came to win a free Harley and forgot who’s offering that Harley.

“Conversion rate” (for retail advertisers), “time spent” and “share volume” are a few other metrics that are at least as important as CTR. “Quality score” should be another, since low quality will affect all the others. Advertisers running Digg Ads here at Digg, for example, get more exposure and lower rates based not only on CTR but by the ratio of Diggs (positive feedback) to buries (negative feedback). While CTR rewards the urgency of the offer and the relevance of the advertising copy, Diggs and buries — votes which tend be submitted after a Digg reader clicks on an ad — measure the totality of the experience. Did the landing page deliver what the ad promised? Was the experience on the advertiser’s site a good one? Was it good enough that you’d share it with a friend or a few thousand followers in Twitter?

Get your customers to click, but remember that the click is only the first date.

That’s the headline for the Business Insider’s Chart of the Day from yesterday, which maps audience size for the leading social news sites.

(Disclosure: I work for Digg.)

Mashable and TBI are reporting on data from widget-maker AddToAny that shows more people now share links via Facebook than via email, with Twitter just behind email.

Mashable’s interpretation of the data:

“According to AddToAny, Facebook now dominates sharing, with 24 percent of shares from the widget consisting of users posting items to the social network. That handily beats out email (11.1 percent) and Twitter (10.8 percent), making the world’s most popular social network also the most popular service for sharing content.”

While it’s true (and probably important) that more people upload links to Facebook than to Twitter or share them with friends by way of email, it’s more important to measure what recipients or viewers of those links do with them. If Twitter users are, say, three times more likely to click on links than Facebook users, Twitter would be driving more traffic to content (via links posted to Twitter) than Facebook, even though more links flow through the collective Facebook news feed. The above chart, for example, suggests Delicious — because more links are uploaded to Delicious — is more important than Digg, even though Digg’s monthly audience is something like twenty times the size of Delicious’s.

Let’s say links to the site PaidContent are uploaded to four different sites or services — Facebook (twice), Twitter (four times), Reddit (15 times) and ChasNote (25 times). If we draw a chart like the one above, ChasNote seems most important.

If instead we draw the chart based on clicks on those links, it might look something more like this: Twitter drives 75 visitors, Facebook 50, Reddit 10 and ChasNote 2. If the value of links is the traffic they drive, Twitter and Facebook (in this case) are much more important than Reddit and ChasNote.

Well isn’t the Guardian hip for recognizing the face of news?!

Congrats to FM friends, partners & sometimes-partners: PopURLs, Digg, and Reddit.

From yesterday’s WSJ in an article about traditional publishers acquiring web services platforms like Conde Nast’s acquisition of FM alum Reddit.

“Usually when publishers acquire technology companies it’s to spruce up their own Web sites. But increasingly publishers such as Conde Nast and Meredith are drawing on the technology to create advertising campaigns for marketers.

“This takes publishers further into the realm of marketing services. Instead of simply selling marketers ad space, they’re rolling up their sleeves and designing the promotions as well. For the next five months, visitors to the Dillard’s Web site will be able to rank products featured in a top-10 list selected by Conde Nast’s Lucky magazine and fashion Web site Style.com. The fashion lists will rotate seasonally, giving visitors the chance to rank new items every two weeks. The top-rated item on the list then will appear in Dillard’s online ads running on nine Conde Nast Web sites, including Teen Vogue, Glamour, Style.com and Vanity Fair.”

Smart. Also not surprising. High-end offline media companies have always had staff and production capabilities to provide marketing services well beyond trafficking and inserting commercials. This is part of what drives premium rates at leading media brands. Advertisers expect their media partners to do more than cash their checks; they demand that their media partners help them succeed among an audience that the media companies know best.

This is why I was confused by news that ESPN has discontinued working with ad networks. I get it that ad networks cause pricing and channel conflict because — despite promising publishers like ESPN to sell their remnant inventory in a blind manner, as part of a “channel” — they sometimes pitch site-specific opportunities. They offer lower rates for the same banners ESPN sells directly. This is a partnership problem, a serious one, but one that should be addressed with tactics short of termination. It’s not religious problem, as ESPN and others have portrayed it. From Mediaweek:

“ESPN’s decision crystallizes a philosophical debate in the online ad sales industry that has intensified since the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s annual meeting last month when during a keynote address, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia media president Wenda Harris Millard gave her now famous warning against selling Web inventory like ‘pork bellies.’”

My interpretation of Wenda Harris Millard’s pork-bellies battle cry is this. Digital publishers need to remember that they are publishers — companies that engage with high-quality audiences around content in a unique and magical conversation, and service firms that know how to chaperon marketing brands into those conversations. In other words, companies in the mold of Conde Nast, Meredith and ESPN that offer high-touch marketing services.

Whatever ad avails you don’t sell, offer up on the pork-belly exchanges — online we call them ad networks (or Google Adsense), in TV we call them PI or DR rep firms. Hey, people sometimes want pork bellies, and audiences almost certainly don’t want 30-seconds of white static whenever a TV network fails to sell 100% of spots.

But if you don’t or can’t articulate what it is that makes your media brand uniquely valuable to your marketing partners (hint: it’s not your demographics), you’ve ceased to be publisher.

More on the difference between publishers and ad networks from Battelle.

Randy Schwartz, Carat Interactive’s search director, pointed me to a Forbes story today I missed back on October 17, Digg This Headline, For Google’s Sake. Social media sites and blogs that are read by other blog publishers, it argues, can help push brands toward the top of natural search engine results.

“‘Social media’ sites like Digg, Reddit.com and Newsvine.com let users submit and rank news headlines and other links to sites around the Web. Sites voted to the top of these news aggregators receive tens of thousands of visitors. But the online marketing professionals gathered at New York’s Search Marketing Expo this week were interested in tapping into a different feature of these sites: their growing power to affect Google and Yahoo!’s search results….

“More important than that traffic, however, was the list’s role as ‘linkbait.’ ….Because Google ranks a Web site’s relevance based on the number of other sites linking to it, LifeInsure [a site with content picked up by Digg] now ranks fourth in Google’s results when the search giant’s millions of users search for ‘life insurance.’ Suddenly, the company had free advertising that put its name right next to huge brands like Metlife and Prudential….

“In fact, every headline that reaches Digg’s home page receives an average of 129 links, according to search marketer Neil Patel, and each of those links can push an online business’ traffic closer to the coveted top spots in Google or Yahoo!’s results. Digg is by far the greatest source of links and traffic among social media sites: A popular story on the site gets as many as 100,000 unique visitors. Sites like StumbleUpon, Reddit, Newsvine and Propeller can each add between 5,000 and 10,000 more.”