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.
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