PMM - Public Media Metrics - Web Metrics for Public Media Organizations

Thursday, December 18, 2008

December 2008 Report Published

A Quick Look Back

With the publication of this Fall PMM book, we reach our first anniversary.

A year ago in mid-November, we published the first —apples-to-apples? look at what was going on at public radio and TV sites. Before that, you had to go on word of mouth, where numbers would get distorted as they passed from one person to the next. Or you had to compare results from WebTrends with Omniture or maybe from Alexa, which no one found reliable. No one was really sure whether their results were good, bad or indifferent.

I, personally, found it disconcerting to sit through conference presentations where someone would discuss a very interesting idea, often with great visuals and a good deal of mission-driven zeal. But I never knew: did people actually use that feature? Did it attract a lot of people or just a few? And how did that compare to the feature we saw in the last presentation?

This year, we, collectively, took a giant step toward answering those questions. By creating a unified —metrics aggregator,? which we now call Public Media Metrics, our analysts can now tell us if this feature worked better than that feature. And sometimes, they can even provide reasonably explanations about why one feature performed more effectively than another.

By gaining new participants and aggregating data for more than a hundred site-accounts, the PMM system is providing the basic information our analysts need to identify trends and isolate significant developments.

Has it made a difference? Over the last year, the 26 sites that started reporting to PMM prior to Nov. 1 ’07 have grown by an average of 40% in terms of monthly visits with a median growth rate of 21% (3.87 million in Nov. ?07 to 5.42 million in Nov. ?08).

At the top end of this group are sites that doubled their Nov. monthly traffic over the last year.

Chicagopublicradio.org grew by 104.7%, edging out publicradio.org (Minnesota Public Radio) which grew by 103.1%.
In raw traffic growth, Minnesota dwarfed everyone with 1.556 million visits in Nov. 2008, an increase of 790,000 visits, when compared with Nov. 2007.

Behind these two,

Kentucky Educational Television (+83%), WGBH (+75%), WCPN (+62%) and KWMU (+58%) all came in with year-toyear increases of over 50%.

We started a year ago with just a two dozen stations. Now we‘re tracking more than a hundred sites every day. Until we get double that number contributing data, I‘m not sure we can say we have a handle on industry-wide performance. But we‘ve got a start. More important,ly we‘re moving steadily to establish the baseline we need to accurately calibrate growth in the year ahead.