Digital publishers are adjusting their definitions of “audience” as it becomes clear that traffic has less bearing on their ability to generate revenue than they once thought.
As the challenges facing ad-supported media mount, many publishers are placing direct audience revenue at the center of their business models instead. This shift is driving publishers to fundamentally rethink the metrics and key performance indicators they use to guide their businesses – and ultimately to acknowledge that their genuinely engaged “audiences” may be much smaller than they’ve previously chosen to believe.
Monthly visitors were never a good proxy for “audience” but it made some sense in a world where the ability to rack up pageviews and ad impressions was integral to publishers’ business models. The more traffic they could generate, the more money that could be extracted from advertisers, the theory went.