What if your best-performing content isn’t actually your best-performing content?
We’re in the era of big data and analytics, a time of greater appreciation and comprehension of measuring success than ever before. And yet the metrics we use to understand content performance are still evolving, still open to scrutiny, and we continue to chase the meaning of a post or piece of content’s value.
Nick Cicero has spent much of his career leading measurement frameworks and evolving, even revolutionizing, the paradigms we use to measure and analyze media. Along the way, the platforms, packaging, and consumption patterns have necessitated changes in how we consider content; however, the longstanding models, as well as the companies hosting or presenting content themselves, often lag behind their platforms’ own evolution.
Cicero has watched the evolution at the front of the pack, seeing the shifts happen in real-time, and understanding the need for measurement to evolve, too.
“The biggest challenge that we always had was we would have to use engagements as a proxy for interest,” said Cicero, founder and CEO of Mondo Metrics. “But we know that only like the 1% of people are really engaging, for example, relative to everybody. That’s why whenever we look at things like engagement rate and we use followers as the denominator, which a lot of people do, that is outdated and old, right?
“That’s a metric that has now evolved because, one, you can game it, but two, it’s not really relevant if all of your followers don’t have the chance to see all your content, and that’s changing. So we were using all of these proxy metrics to help us understand that…”
Engagement worked well enough in the early days. There weren’t any better options, anyway. But then the form factor for content diversified, making content trickier to measure. Video exploded and each platform decided what constituted a video view. Snapchat came along and disrupted everything, with the 24-hour lifespan and taps forward (and back), completion, and exits entering the picture. Cicero saw all this happening and sought a solution.
“We said, ‘Hey, what is a Story but a compilation of videos that you’re just playing back in a row once again over a 24-hour window of time?’ So if the first frames of the video and the day expire, and I’m missing the point of telling the Story, my Story is incomplete,” said Cicero, whose previous company, Delmondo (later acquired by Conviva), was the first to provide analytics for Stories. “So that’s where it gave us the inspiration to say, ‘Well, maybe we should be measuring completion rate. But how do we do that?’ That’s what caused us to start to blow things apart and look at what are new metrics that we can combine and relationships that haven’t been there before.”
The new models required new ways of thinking. But it was also just the industry, influenced by ideas espoused by leaders like Cicero, catching up to modes of thinking that should’ve been there all along. Does the sum of the views of the first frame or two of a cohesive Stories package really matter as much as those sessions where users actually complete the Story? Does it make sense to celebrate a ‘viral’ 3-minute piece of content that earns over a million views as a massive success if the majority of those views are only watching a minuscule portion of the video? If one team’s content grabs a few seconds at a time while another’s gets a few minutes, but they both display the same number of ‘views,’ is that really an equivalent result?
An oft-referenced remark offered by Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings in 2017 was that the streaming platform’s primary competition was sleep. While that thinking takes things to an extreme, it’s directionally accurate; we’re all competing for the discretionary, finite time people have in their social media sessions, their content consumption time, and the waking hours overall in their days.
“They all want to capture attention; they want to measure the most attention,” said Cicero, referencing Mondo Metrics’s work with podcasters, sports teams and leagues, and other brands and creators. “They want to take the biggest share of your attention from somebody else at the end of the day, and that’s why what we really try to preach is that we need to prioritize for watch time and quality time spent on these platforms, the amount of total consumption that might occur in a day, for example. Because those are the numbers that add up.”
Cicero elaborated further, adding another wrinkle to that ubiquitous term ‘engagement’: “I keep going back to that [idea] of depth of engagement,” he said, “and it’s like when I go into a viewing experience, and this is what we thought with Stories as well, like when I go into this experience of consumption, what am I doing? What are the other options that I have? What are the different paths that I take to continue on and move through that?”
Getting a user to watch the first few frames of a story or the opening part of a video is something to be celebrated. Retention, completion, and overall time spent make up a fuller picture, but you can’t consume content without starting it. You can’t completely view content without watching the middle, and you can’t complete it without watching the end. That’s the point, Cicero explained to me, articulating the anatomical makeup of content into discrete slices that can each be analyzed and optimized.
“I like to think about it in like those three buckets,” Cicero said. “If you look at a video, what metrics are at the beginning, middle, and end? And depending on what my goal is, I’m going to look at stuff differently, right? Like, if I’m struggling to get viewers on my channel, I’m probably going to look at the first [elements] — what is it in the title? What is it in the thumbnail? What is it in the hook that is working or not working? Okay, cool, so what if I’m getting millions and millions of views, but people are only sticking around and watching my YouTube videos for like 7 or 8 seconds? Well, then I might look at the middle to the end metrics, like, okay, well, how long is my video? What’s the retention?
“It’s so crazy sometimes that people will spend all this time and energy to make a 20-minute video and get a million views and have an average watch time of 10 seconds. What you’re basically telling me is that probably 90% of the people left, and you just had a few people who were really invested in it. You’ve got to try something different. It’s cool that it might have gotten a million views because it might have been a viral hook or something , but there’s no substance to it. So, depending on what your goal is, you almost need to look at a different slice of the video in that sense.”
It’s not just social media that’s experiencing a reckoning for measurement. Remember ten years ago, back in 2015, when Yahoo made waves broadcasting the first-ever NFL Game exclusively on a livestream? They reported massive numbers, buttressed by the fact that anybody landing on the Yahoo home page had the livestream autoplay, racking up those ‘views,’ along with the industry grappling with how to define viewership on such a new platform. Recall that traditional TV ratings like Nielsen generally report the average minute audience (AMA), the number of viewers watching, on average, every minute of the broadcast. How many social platforms report a view as a minute of watch time? Yep, none. As content delivery platforms converge, the concept of viewership and performance is evolving by necessity. And as sports teams and leagues, along with other digital-first content creators, mold themselves into media companies in their own right, they need to think less in terms of the old metrics.
“If you’re like a true media executive, you’re going to look at your time spent on YouTube and try to think comparably to television, right?” said Cicero. “Because if you’re ESPN or whomever, you’re like, ‘Okay, these many people spend this much time on television, but then they’re going and watching Pat McAfee live every day, they’re going and watching this. So we can’t not look at the depth. We can’t not look at the total consumption time that they spend with our brand.
“So executives see that, but then content teams see that now too, because they realize that, for the most part, it’s helpful to tell executives big numbers, vanity metrics. But as you start to dig in to look at what’s really effective and what’s not, that’s when you have to really dig into the details.”
Anyone working in content in sports grapples with the daily hamster wheel, the never-ending battle to produce the next piece or post in the battle for eyeballs and attention. The fortunate part of working in sports is the cycle is amenable to such constant output, where there’s always another game. But whether the sport plays over 160 games or fewer than 20, that still leaves a lot of blank space to fill. There are only so many mini mic questions (Team Conrad or Team Jeremiah?) and manufactured tentpoles (hey, schedule release content is fun and awesome).
But, again, as the transformation of sports teams and leagues turning into media companies continues, the opportunity arises for sports to think in catalogs, to consider longer shelf-life content that can capture fan attention (and drive incremental revenue) for weeks, months, and even years to come. Cicero addressed the challenges of the inherent ‘rat race’ nature of the daily battle for attention, as well as the opportunity to appreciate the LTV (lifetime value) of content. It doesn’t mean every piece of content needs to capture engagement for years to come, just that, where it can, that should enter into the strategy and ROI calculus.
“Sure, you’re going to pump out some highlights,” said Cicero, who, in addition to running Mondo Metrics, teaches digital analytics at Syracuse. “And definitely that works for TikTok and Instagram and those short half life platforms. But now as we move into YouTube, well, we need to start thinking about, is that piece of content going to have staying power, years from now?…
“When you go back to the evolution of measurement, I think now people are starting to realize that, yes, I have the churn and burn of the algorithm that I have to fight every single day, that kind of rolls with the flow of the world, the way that the media cycle works, the way that we’re hyper short attention-driven in that sense, because we’re in this rat race of the world that we live in.
“But then at the end of the week, we are here on a Friday afternoon, if you really take a step back when you have some free time to breathe and think of a piece of content that you want to watch, then that’s where people are starting to think about this more. That’s when people really care about average watch time, and the minutes consumed, the quality of the content that’s going out there. And I’m excited by that. Because it means that people who would typically have been making a lot of social content, or maybe never got the chance to get on TV, are bringing really quality storytelling into these platforms and spending more time. So I see this as a really strong evolution.”
Next time you see a video popping off with “views” or a post that racked up impressions, remember that’s not the full story. The era of vanity metrics is fading; depth of engagement is where true value lies. The ways we measure content have changed for the better, and there’s no going back.
We’ve mastered the science of capturing attention; the real challenge now is keeping it.
