An advantage of working at Chartbeat is that one has no shortage of data from which to derive insight. Our growth over the last year has meant we now track almost half a trillion events per month. This enables us to deeply understand patterns of user behaviour in 60 countries and across 50,000 websites. It allows a unique insight into where the world is going.
When we take a step back and look at what that information is telling us, we see three principal trends in the industry:
- Content teams often affect revenue per page more than ad ops teams
- The market for content has accelerated as traditional advertising suffers under the weight of the four horsemen: viewability, ad fraud, page speed and ad blocking
- Publishers have a deep desire to adapt, but there is considerable friction to them doing so
With that in mind, we’re announcing three new initiatives centered around what Chartbeat can do to adapt and increase the pace of change in the industry.
- We are doubling down on our investment in content tools to meet the needs of our content creator customer base
- To help publishers better make the case for the revenue impact of quality content, Chartbeat is opening up our Engaged Ad Refresh technology to all our Chartbeat Publishing clients and open-sourcing some of our newest ad measurement technology
- We’re partnering with Moat to see if we can move the web faster through close collaboration.
Let me break that down.
Doubling down on content: Making great user experience means greater revenue
Content teams now often have more impact on per page revenue than ad ops teams. If a visitor spends fewer than 15 seconds on the page, average viewability is around 28%. If a visitor spends greater than 15 seconds on a page then average viewability increases to 60%. Publish clickbait and languish at 28%, publish content that actually captures attention, promote it with the right headline and it more than doubles.
Secondly, researchers at Microsoft Research found that a rigorous engaged refresh strategy delivers better per page performance for advertisers. When we assessed the potential impact over the Chartbeat network it also increases the total number of viewable impressions by 69%. Leveraging engaged refresh is probably the single easiest and most useful thing a publisher can do to survive in a viewable world. Both improving viewability and increasing inventory through engaged refresh have one common theme: revenue depends directly upon the user’s experience.
We’re going to be gradually rolling out our Engaged Ad Refresh technology to our Chartbeat Publishing clients. We want every publisher to be able to directly draw the connection between engaging content and greater revenue. To make that even easier, we’re also open-sourcing some key Chartbeat tech to allow publishers — our clients and otherwise — who use DFP to better optimise for engagement rather than just clicks. Adapting for and building a business on attention should be determined by a business choice, not the technology you choose to partner with.
Collaboration beats Competition: Partnering with Moat
If we want the web to move towards a place in which user experience is paramount, then having every company sitting in their own silo trying to boil the ocean makes no sense.
The web was built with collaboration more than competition; each contributor an expert in their field contributing their skills to the global whole and building something magnificent as a result. If we want the web to get better faster we should do the same.
That means doubling down on what we do best and partnering with others to move the web forward faster. Moat has long been a voice in chorus with our own about the need to move away from clicks and towards attention. Moat has been the go-to for publishers on the ads side, just as Chartbeat has been when it comes to content.
As companies, we both believe that our ability to move the web forward will be advanced by working together. We’ve already seen customers derive tremendous advantage when they are able to stitch together our respective data sets, even when it hasn’t been easy. Enabling Chartbeat’s content tools and data to work in harmony with Moat’s ad tools and data can open up new ways for publishers to benefit without having to disrupt their workflows.
I’m excited to see what better collaboration can do for an attention-focused web.