Engaging Analytics with Michael C. Cook

August 20th, 2010 by Michael C. Cook

Wired Magazine released an article earlier this week declaring “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.” Now, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy reading Wired’s articles. Most of the time what they produce is informed and interesting. However, the article in question is an obvious attempt to create controversy and get eyeball.

The basic premise of the article is that since “the web” accounts for less overall bandwidth traffic on the internet, that internet users are abandoning the traditional web for other types of interaction (e.g., apps and such).

The core issue is the basic premise is completely off the mark. It shows how easy it is to distort data by using the right visualization. Let’s look at the graph of data that is the core problem. The graph shows that the portion of bandwidth dedicated to video traffic video has grown tremendously, overtaking “web” traffic by a tidy amount.

The issue with this visualization is multi-fold:

1) It is an overall percentage based chart. While the percentage of the overall bandwidth dedicated to “the web” has decreased, the overall pie has increase significantly. If we map out the total overall estimated traffic for the web you can see it has grown by about 100 times what it was in 2000.

Wow! That looks much different, right?

2) The graph equates overall size with actual consumption. Not all media is created equal. While video files are much larger, the impact of the data is well overstated. If I spend 5 minutes reading a blog post and another 30 seconds watching a short video, the blog post will have arguably engaged me more. However, would appear much larger if you charted it out. Look at the following chart…

Do you see Blog on there? It’s on there I promise, it’s just super small. This is a case of measuring the wrong piece of data. We should be looking at actual engagement rather than overall file size.

3) What is “The Web” anyway? This is a question of how the taxonomy is set up. While a majority of content might be video, I’m sure a great portion of that comes via the browser via sites like YouTube and Hulu. There are a number of set-top boxes out there that can stream internet content, but these are the vast minority.

Also, one wonders where music falls on this graph. Is that “The Web”? Certainly the bandwidth taken up by podcasts and streaming media services like Pandora should have shown up somewhere. They are conspicuously absent.

So what’s the deal? Certainly internet traffic is growing exponentially. Where is this traffic coming from if “the web” isn’t suffering? The population growth can’t explain it and people don’t suddenly have additional hours of free time they didn’t have before.

The truth is “the web” isn’t being replaced, but traditional media delivery methods are. Traditional media has been hit hard by the move to the internet. Newspaper and magazine subscriptions are down across the board (yes, including Wired).

But probably more significant is the growth of online video as an alternative to TV. Even the finales of American Idol manage to only pull in a small portion of what the audiences TV used to pull in. Just as people have abandoned their landlines to move to just having mobile phones as their main phone, younger demographics are dumping their TVs, in favor of a PC or mobile viewing devices. And who could blame them? With the availability of content and the convenience of all in one device, a TV seems redundant.

That’s not to say traditional media is dead or being completely replaced by online activity either. For example, after some mid-decade stalling, movie box office receipts are higher than they’ve ever been and continue to trend up. The front-porch newspaper and magazines might be close to dead, but truly savvy media organizations (The New York Times, The Economist, even Wired Magazine) are sure to exist in some format for many years to come thanks to their mobile, audio and web presence. How we interact with these brands may be different, but they are likely to remain. Look at what Wired managed to do with an simple online article.

April 16th, 2009 by Michael C. Cook

Check out my post on the Webtrends blog about the groundbreaking new Webtrends MOSS 2007 solution:
http://tinyurl.com/d3u4fc

November 21st, 2008 by Michael C. Cook

(For WebTrends users using SmartSource (JavaScript) Data Collection (SDC))

From time to time content developers have to deal with systems that do not allow them to add meta tags to their pages. Some portal based systems do not even access the main page content until after the HTML document head has been rendered. Or perhaps you’re working with a content management system that does not allow you access to the main page templates where you would usually place meta data content.

However, if you’re able to enter JavaScript in the page content areas you do control, you can still add meta data to the page. JavaScript has a DOM or Document Object Model. This DOM gives you access to the content of the HTML document. Not only can you scan content, but you can also add content to the DOM.

In the following example we are adding a tag called test2 (called DCSext.test2 so the WebTrends tag will pick it up) with a value of “test good”. The following code creates a JavaScript parameter with the two values. It then accesses the DOM via the head and adds the meta data tags to the document.

<script type="text/javascript">
var meta;
if (document.createElement && (meta = document.createElement('meta')))
{
meta.name = "DCSext.test2";
meta.content = "test good";
document.getElementsByTagName('head').item(0).appendChild(meta);
}
</script>

Since the WebTrends base tag access the meta tag DOM directly, it will read the new meta data and send it to your SmartSource Data Collector. This strategy is an easy way to tackle some of the common pain you have when you cannot fully control the page creation.