BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS

New Engagement Metrics from BusinessWeek.com
Monday, January 28, 2008
Jeremy Greenfield

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Much maligned, page views and unique views are still the standard for measuring a Web site’s popularity. As audience development managers and the Interactive Advertising Bureau set to develop and standardize the next generation of metrics, BusinessWeek.com has taken an independent step in that direction.

Announced through a letter from the editor—John Byrne—last week, BW.com will start measuring its reader engagement through a comments-to-postings ratio. For instance, In December, BW.com published roughly 15,500 comments on over 600 stories that were posted that month. This gives the site about a 23-1 ratio on its “reader engagement index”. In the letter, Byrne stated that “we think a metric like this will be more meaningful than page views or time spent on a site."

In conversation with minonline, Byrne talked about some of the rationale, details, and future plans for the initiative.  From our discussions, it's clear that the "reader engagement index" will be the cornerstone of BW.com metrics moving forward: "I’m sorry I didn’t think of this earlier: it is a no-brainer," says Byrne.  More from him this week at theminsider.com and in the upcoming issue (2/4) of min's b2b.


Giving Back

Like any good Web editor, now that he knows what he’s going after (engagement), Byrne has instituted a program to encourage meaningful comments on stories. The “In Your Face” feature at BW.com is a special section that highlights the most insightful reader commentary and the most prolific commenters. At the end of the year, the top 100 commenters will receive an “I Got In Your Face at BusinessWeek.com” t-shirt, and the most insightful readers will be invited to New York for a dinner with senior editors at BW.com.

More on this from Byrne later today. Stay tuned. And, though there are no t-shirts and dinners forthcoming, please feel free to leave a comment.

Click here to view our most recent consumer mag digital media Boxscores, and click here to view our most recent B2B mag digital media Boxscores.  (Both links are premium.)

Click here for Byrne's letter from the editor.
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