Charles on… anything that comes along

Chris Green posted a while ago about how he’d spent ages sweating over the precise statistics of who clicked through to read what, and what that told him about whether he was getting value for money from his freelances.

Scary, huh?

Every few months I perform what I call a contributor/traffic analysis. This involves generating a report from the main IT PRO site stats tool that shows the page impressions (PIs) and unique user visits (UUs) generated by author, rather than by article type or section.

I then merge this data with the main contributor expenditure spreadsheet, where we record and track all our freelance spending.

The end result is that we have the traffic generated by an author alongside how much we’ve spent with them over the given period. You divide the amount spent by either the PIs or the UUs and you end up with a cost per PI and a cost per UU, based on a specific author.

It’s not a perfect system, as the PIs and UUs also include legacy content written by that author that was accessed during the given period, not just the new stuff you’ve commissioned and allocated budget for. However, it still provides a valuable metric on the effectiveness of that author’s work to bring in traffic to the site, as well as the cost of acquiring that traffic.

We can do this a bit with the Guardian’s “Most viewed” widget, which is available for any section. (Have a look at Technology’s Most Viewed, which is for the past 24 hours or seven days.)

Quite amazingly, the most-read for the past 24 hours are all from the past week. (Except the “50 best YouTube videos” one. That sort of thing never dies.) And actually, right now it’s unusual, because nothing in the most-viewed for the past seven days or 24 hours is older than a few weeks.

That’s not always the case; quite often stories from a year, two years, three years ago will pop up abruptly, and often - because of the way that “most viewed” tabs work - stick there.

This is the bit that gives me pause about Chris’s musings on paying people. Are we going to get into some weird pay-per-click model, where freelances get paid a certain basic amount, and then more if the number of pageviews goes over a certain amount? I can see that it might be worth hiring a botnet for a week or two to see if you could get around that. Or seeing Digg etc with your stories. Hell, being a freelance would be an arms race in all sorts of ways; writing the story would become the least of the challenges. Making sure it got read enough would become a prime aim.

Of course there’s all sorts of things that a site editor can do - by watching your traffic, tweaking headlines, choosing clever pictures. But something about what Chris is describing makes me …uneasy.

Perhaps though it’s just the adjustment to the world where we really can measure these things (and so ought to, I guess). They’re telling commissioning editors uncomfortable things about what subjects really get read. (I find it interesting to track how many paper-to-web clickthroughs we get from the bit.ly links we use in Technology. It’s a lot.)

What’s the feeling though? Is it only sensible to do this or is it going over the top?

Bonus link: Countervalue reckons that copy editing has about five years left before it’s made redundant by computers.

But how, ask at least a dozen copy editors, can I really expect to replace headline writing and rewriting of crap copy?

I don’t know where you guys have been for the last few years but you obviously have no idea what Google Labs has been up to or how major publishers have been playing about with text mining engines (TMEs).

I spent most of yesterday with one of the Telegraph Media Group’s major software suppliers. If you’d seen my Twitter updates you will have known that I was not expecting anything beyond yet another demonstration of an integrated web and print CMS. But what my colleague from IT and I were shown will, if development proceeds as expected, replace the sub editor, the researcher and, quite possibly, a whole load of news editors within five years.

Feeling reassured now? No? Do explain…

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• How two guys wrote the app that nearly became iTunes: the story of Audion (12 November 2004; score: 29.02%)
• If you write good software, they will come (and pay you) (15 October 2004; score: 27.85%)
• Notwithstanding iTunes.. (22 July 2004; score: 21.16%)