Metrics matter to media companies. They affect the way a publisher measures its audience, the way it sells advertising, and the extent of its bragging rights. The only problem is that almost everyone in the business is unhappy about the lack of sophistication of today's most commonly used metrics.
Today, BuzzFeed said it's going to change how it measures itself. Specifically, the company said it will no longer rely on web publishing's old standby, the "unique visitor." Instead, in an effort to look at itself more holistically, BuzzFeed publisher Dao Nguyen says the company will embrace a range of metrics, from time spent with a piece of content to what it calls "content views."
"Even two years ago, when we all lived in a simpler media landscape, we believed there was no 'one metric to rule them all,'" Nguyen wrote in a blog post. "Today that is even more true."
For BuzzFeed, abandoning the unique visitor makes sense. The company, after all, publishes a whole lot of content all over the Internet—not just on its website. It may publish a so-called listicle on BuzzFeed.com, for example, but then a food video directly on Facebook or Snapchat. While BuzzFeed may be able to track "uniques" on its website, app, and certain parts Facebook and YouTube, Nguyen says, it can't for Snapchat, Instagram, Yahoo, Tumblr, Vine, and other parts of Facebook and YouTube.
"We estimate that our current comScore metric of about 80 million [unique visitors] represents less than one-fifth of our actual global reach," Nguyen says.
For BuzzFeed, the claim that its actual audience is significantly bigger sounds reasonable. But as Recode's Peter Kafka has written, BuzzFeed's unique visitor growth has indeed slowed. A cynic might say that BuzzFeed is trying to change the conversation by creating a new way to showcase its growth.
But that wouldn't be entirely fair. It's a fact that the media industry is no longer simple. It can't be measured by one metric. And advertisers know it.
