WSJ.com Relaunched Yesterday

Hey, gang.

I'm taking a deep breath after we've launched the newly redesigned WSJ.com. Check it out at www.wsj.com. See the press:

• The New WSJ.com: Very Popular With Readers, Very Expensive For Advertisers


• WSJ.Com's Redesign Sneak Peek: See Tuesday's Paper Today


• Facebook, meet Journal: Revamped WSJ site brings social-networking elements, better navigation


• New WSJ.com Builds on Its Community of Subscribers


• Wall Street Journal refreshes, reloads


• WSJ.com Relaunches During Financial News Meltdown; Glossy New Look, Business Song Remains The Same


• WSJ’s New Look Is Fresh But Still Not Free


• Report: WSJ.com to get social-networking makeover


• Wall Street Journal Online to unveil major redesign


• Misery Loves Company: WSJ.com to Launch Comments Feature


• ‘Wall Street Journal’ to unveil revamped Web site


• WSJ.com Redesign Triples Article Ad Inventory


• WSJ.com Launches Redesign


• Wall Street Journal Relaunches Website


• WSJ.com adds to user experience


• WSJ.com's New Look


• WSJ to revamp online presence, embrace the social


• Market Movers: The WSJ's Gorgeous Redesign


• WSJ.com redesigns site to boost revenue


• Wall Street Debacle Nets Record Traffic to Redesigned WSJ.com


• WSJ online subscription revenue to rise: Murdoch


• WSJ.com relaunches, revamps newsroom: "This is just the beginning"


• Wall Street Journal site looks to social networking

From Folio Magazine: What A Blue Chip Advertiser Wants from You

IBM outlines 8 steps for publisher success in the June 2008 issue of Folio Magazine. I was unable to find the article on FolioMag.com, but here are the eight tips:

Edward Abrams, VP for Marketing at IBM, "highlights eight key points publishers should focus on as they look for more progressive, multimedia solutions for advertisers:"

1. User generated content
2. Trust in the ability of the audience to be self-policing
3. Peer-to-Peer interaction
4. Transparency and openness
5. Low barriers to entry
6. Collaboration
7. Connecting
8. Investment

I'll post a link to the article when I come across it.

Behavioral Marketing for Audience Development

I was in Chicago yesterday speaking at a Circulation Management conference. Here's the deck:

| View | Upload your own

Viewthrough...

Chen Wang writes about the challenges with viewthrough and clickthrough metrics. In his Online Metrics Insider article today: Viewthrough and Beyond.

For those of you who may not know already, viewthrough conversions are associated with people who saw your online ad, but didn't actually click on it, and who later order your product or take the desired action.

I haven't been able to get my head around viewthroughs as an effective metric to what's going on with an online media campaign. They're kind of fuzzy in my mind.

Chen talks about a new way of measuring viewthroughs. Using something called ad decay:

Empirically, the decay can be represented through a downward trending curve.

When we are focusing upon viewthrough conversions, the curve is constructed by bucketing all the viewthrough conversions by day(s) of latency on each frequency level. Latency measures the lag effect of advertising on conversion. A latency of 1 day includes all the conversions that happen within 1 day after the last time the user is served the ad. Since we normally track it for 30 days, we are looking at 30 different latency buckets If the ad has any effect, we should see a downward trend as latency days extend. In other words, more conversions happen at the beginning than at the end of the latency scale for the frequency level that the curve is built upon. The decay curve, in and by itself, demonstrates that there exists some impact from the ad campaign upon conversions. As a matter of fact, if there were no ad campaign, consumers would “convert” at a fairly constant pace on the latency scale. In other words, we should be looking at a flat line instead of an ad decay curve.

To take this line of thought one step further, we can actually calculate the elusive viewthrough attribution percentage from the decay curve. If the curve decays at a certain frequency level, there will be a point on the decay curve at which the curve starts to look more like a flat line than a curve.

Read more here.

Filtrbox Fun...

I just learned about Filtrbox from Brad Feld's post at AlwaysOn: Filter Box Gets Better Everyweek.




The vision for Filtrbox when they started at TechStars last summer was to create an integrated single dashboard of all this keyword alert information.

Learn more about Filtrbox at Seth Levin's VC Adventure blog: Know what you don't know.

An excerpt:

Filtrbox was one of last year's TechStars companies and the the one with which I worked most closely (after the summer TechStars program I participated in their angel financing round). They've developed a system that if you had to describe it in a single sentence is "Google Alerts on steroids". That said, it's almost unfair to compare the two as Google Alerts just isn't designed to provide users with the accuracy, level of coverage, ability to tune and provide feedback to alert terms and the overall representation of data that Filtrbox provides - even now in the relatively early version of the Filtrbox platform. Filtrbox allows me to set up a series of "filtrs" that contain various keywords so that I can organize the things I'm looking to track. Every morning I get a "daily briefing" email that lists all the hits from the last 24 hours and online I can use their dashboard to see up-to-date hits in list and graphical form, manipulate the data, adjust the sensitivity of the report (so I see fewer, but more directly relevant hits) and tune the system by providing it feedback on the information it provides me. Below is a snapshot of their dashboard to give you a sense of what I see every day (in true Web 2.0 fashion, everything in the image below will give me more information as I mouse over it and I can adjust the data I'm seeing on the fly by checking and unchecking keywords or entire filtr groups or adjusting the sensitivity (the slider in the top center of the page).

Let me know if you'd like an invite to the private beta.

Modernista! and a modern social media website

A few weeks ago, Modernista got written up on AdAge.com, and bloggers have been blogging about it for about a month. I love it. They basically redesigned their website by powering it with Wikipedia, Flicker, YouTube, Twitter, Google News, Del.icio.us and Facebook.

The site uses an inline frame to load the URLs while keeping it's navigation on top of the frame as you work through the different sites.

Check out the site yourself: Moderista.com.

Read the buzz:

OnlineSpin: Ad Agency Gets Web 2.0! Can It Be True?
Technorati: Modernista
GoogleNews: Modernista

"Content Wants to Be Free"

This was the starting line of the New Media Expo Newsletter for today. It seemed appropriate to me personally since I now work for WSJ.com and Barrons.com. The idea of free content on the web is as old as the web, but recently there have been a number of folks rethinking this idea. Today it was Tim over at New Media Expo:

"Content wants to be free" and other scary phrases seem to rear their ugly head every so often. This week, the discussion focused around whether content is becoming so easy to get and make that it is becoming worthless.

The bottled water analogy fits perfect here. Tap or drinking fountain water is free and available everywhere. Yet bottled water sales continue to soar because of:

a) Convenience
b) Higher Quality

Read the entire article here.

I definitely believe in paying for higher quality content, whether it be at WSJ.com (I've been a paying customer since 2003), MarketingSherpa.com, Forrester, eMarketer or others.

What do you think?

FRONTLINE: Growing Up Online

This special aired on PBS on January 22, 2007. I wanted to watch it the night it aired, but I didn't have a chance. And I didn't have an opportunity to set up my Tivo to catch it. Long live the Web. I could watch the whole episode on the PBS site here.

"It has been said that the Internet has created the greatest generation gap since the advent of rock 'n roll."

The segments are as follows:

• Living Their Lives Essentially Online
• A Revolution in Classrooms and Social Life
• Self Expression, Trying On New Identities
• The Child Predator Fear
• Private Worlds Outside Parents' Reach?
• Cyberbullying
• Updates
  

It's a pretty good glimpse into ways that teens are interacting online. Some stories are pretty scary (especially if you're a parent), but the message is pretty clear. Kids are integrating the web and social networking into their lives more every day.

Record Audiences For Newspapers Online

WHILE THEIR PRINT EDITIONS CONTINUED to slide, newspapers enjoyed an online audience boom in 2007, according to the Newspaper Association of America, which says the total unique audience for newspaper Web sites increased 9% in the fourth quarter to an average 62.8 million per month, compared to the same period in 2006. The figure from October, when 63.2 million people visited a newspaper Web site, is an all-time record.

Read the entire article: "Record Audiences For Newspapers Online" at MediaPost.com.

What's going on with WSJ.com?

I've had this question a lot over the past few months, and I've had a strongly vested interest in the outcome since joining Dow Jones in September. Here's the latest from Rupert Murdoch during his talk at the World Economic Forum in Davos:

• WSJ.com to Retain Subscription Component
• Online Wall Street Journal to remain paid site: report
• Rupert Murdoch Says He Will Keep Part Of Online Wall Street Journal Closed for Subscribers Only.
• Wall St. Journal to Continue Its Charges for Web Content

Highlights from Ad:Tech Archives

I came across this great archive of highlights from the Ad:Tech New York 07 event that went down last week. They include some juicy excerpts:

• Follow the Money: Why Some Advertisers Successfully Use Emerging Media and Why Others Can Not - Or Will Not
• Tales from the Bleeding Edge
• Brand Nation: Leading Marketers Share their Vision
• Route CGA: Put the Prize Money Down!
• eCommerce Marketing: The Art of Customer Acquisition
• Extending Your Reach: Leveraging Mobile Content to Drive Your Brand Message
• The Online Female Consumer
• Defensive Branding 101: Troubleshooting Your Brand in the Age of Consumer Control
• Britney Spears: the Social Media Gift that Keeps on Giving
• Multi-Platform Advertising: An Out-of-Body Experience?
  
• Global Perspectives on the Digital Revolution

Search Engine Land's Search Cap

If you haven't already started doing so, you should subscribe to SearchEngineLand.com. It's a great resource on breaking search engine news. Everyday, they do a SearchCap: The Day in Search.

Today's covered:

Search Illustrated: Geo Targeting Search Strategies
AdWords Quality Score: Can Your Business Model Be Banned?
Open Directory Launches The Official DMOZ Blog
Microsoft Dilemma: Facebook Or Yahoo (Or AOL)?
New York Times' Marshall Simmonds: Poster Child Of SEO Success
Is Wikipedia's Community Editing Model About To Die?
Privacy Tuesday: New Google Privacy Video & Privacy Articles
Google News May Index Yahoo Ads

And much more.

The article that jumped out to me today was the one on Marshall Simmonds. It caught my attention for three reasons: First, I met Marshall at an SES conference in Chicago two years ago and was impressed with the meeting. Second, he seems to be a very busy guy with balancing SEO efforts for the NY Times and consulting for other companies. Third, the unexpected SEO benefit from opening up the NYT.com archives to public interests me in my new position at Dow Jones:

Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, said:
But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising.
What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others.

Read the entire article.

YogaToday.com and Instant Media

A few months ago, Deb Ohrn, Editor-in-Chief of Meredith's Creative Collection in Special Interest Media, turned me on to YogaToday.com.

But, I'm lazy. Really lazy. Finally, my wife and I tried it out tonight. We downloaded an hour-long program that was much too advanced for me. I was done within 20 minutes. Theresa and I agreed to only start with beginner ones.

In the first few minutes of the episode, we saw several commercials for GE, Nissan, and Instant Media. Does anyone know more about this platform or solution?