Domain level reach and opportunity to see are two measurement metrics for online press coverage that are increasingly frowned upon. But what to replace them with? In an engaging presentation at the AMEC Virtual Global Summit on Measurement, we learn about a new one that makes a lot more sense.

 

And it appears that there’s a great need for a new way. In this joint presentation from Maya Koleva, Head of Research and Insight, Commetric, and Rune Kleveland, CTO, Opoint Technology, we learn that the fallibility of established metrics is becoming a big issue for clients.

 

“Clients are increasingly finding reach and opportunity to see as meaningless or as an inflated metric that when applied to communications becomes a vanity metric,” says Maya. “It creates a huge number that doesn’t help understand how they performed or what they may be in a position to do about it.”

 

In response to this need, Rune presents a “sensible and measurable” new approach that measures readership of individual web articles. By combining statistical data and standard web metrics we can develop a reliable, scalable estimation of article-level readership. It’s a data point that is driving significant interest in the media communications measurement and evaluation space.

 

It bears in mind how long an article is promoted on a site, and how well-presented it is. As Rune explains: “If an article is visible on a front page for ten minutes, and a front page has two page impressions a second, about 1,200 people have read the article.”

 

Rune provides a unique formula through which we can compute the probability that a unique visitor has opened a section page while it was linking to a given story. “Look at the beauty of it,” he says, proudly.

 

By using this new metric we can calculate the potential number of readers of any article on the web. And with more use cases and applications being explored, we can expect more news to come on this metric. To find out more, visit Opoint.