Communication: We believe that public media professionals will be better equipped to make decisions about and take action with their future web efforts if they are able to have meaningful discussions with one another about the performance of these efforts. A common or “standardized” language is critical to having such discussions.

Accountability: As pubcasters become active with more web-based projects, funding institutions will likely require some relevant reporting on the performance of the projects they fund. A standard for measurement provides this relevance.

Why do we need PMM to collect and analyze data?

Your in-house web metrics system (if you have one) provides the ability to read and analyze data on your own. Like most things, experience is critical to analyzing and understanding the meaning of the data. Public Media Metrics provides a common platform for sharing comparative data. We also publish analysis performed by experienced web analytics professionals - analysis that pubcasters may not have the resources to perform on their own.

Often, our best projects are the result of basic intuition, which is one of the things that make our projects real and exceptional. However, there is always a need for understanding the result of our intuitive efforts in order to learn and advance toward better intuition in the future.