As the Columbia Journalism Review describes in a post on the project, Climate Desk not only found and interviewed their comment troll — a 57-year-old insurance executive named Hoyt Connell — as part of a video series called “The Secret Life of Trolls,” but also profiled a scientist who spends much of her time engaging with trolls on the topic of climate change. In the final instalment, the scientist and the troll met each other via Google Hangout.

The CJR post criticizes the Climate Desk series because “it doesn’t shine as much light under the bridge as it could have,” since it doesn’t go into detail about why Connell latched onto climate change as a topic, or what drives him to comment so aggressively (fittingly enough, Connell comments on the CJR post himself to try and clear some of this up). But what impressed me was how normal this mega-troll seemed once he was interviewed.

Comment trolls are people too

I found the same thing — and I think others did too — when Gawker Media outed a notorious Reddit troll named Violentacrez last year, after attention was drawn to several offensive sub-Reddits he created. Although clearly much of his behavior on the site crossed a line, the interview showed him to be a more-or-less normal, and in some ways even sympathetic (or possibly just pathetic) character. Not that this justified his conduct, but it helped to explain some of it.

We’ve written before about how the value of comments transcends the occasional troll, and how the best way to maintain a civil dialogue is to engage with readers directly, a point blogging pioneer Anil Dash also made in a post a couple of years ago. And writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic have shown that commenters can be much more than just a noisy distraction — in some cases, they can actually become collaborators. The Climate Desk series is a good reminder that trolls are people too.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr / Jeremy King

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In his post, entitled “This Is What Happens When Publishers Invest In Long Stories,” FastCo Labs editor Chris Dannen talked about how the site decided to experiment with what he calls “slow live-blogging” — that is, a series of stories that would take shape over time, beginning with a short stub article consisting mostly of a topic paragraph or summary of an issue, and then get added to as new developments arose. Dannen explained that this was a way of blending news with a more feature-like approach.

“Instead of starting with a fresh article every time we want to cover something inside a regular beat, which might require a long catch-up introduction, context, background and so forth, we could just put fresh news at the top and let the reader scroll down to read previous updates.”

Readers stay longer and read more

What happened when this approach started getting rolled out, Dannen says, was fairly dramatic. As he puts it in his post, the results “blew up my assumptions about how to drive traffic.” Among other things, the tech site’s “bounce rate” — that is, the rate at which readers decided to quit reading and go elsewhere — dropped substantially. The average amount of time spent at the site also increased, as did the number of pages per visit that were read by users.

Dannen says it’s too early to tell how permanent these effects will be for Fast Co. Labs, just as it’s impossible to know whether those favorable results stem from the changes they made in their approach to longer stories. But he says that regardless of these caveats, “it sure as hell looks like it’s working,” and that he believes long-form journalism is the future.

It’s not length, it’s engagement

I am a big believer in the value of longer pieces in general, and I think the once-popular myth that people don’t read longform articles online has been largely disproven (although I wonder how many of those who praised the New York Times feature Snow Fall read the whole thing). But it’s also true that editors and publishers often conflate length and quality — as Caroline O’Donovan pointed out in a (short) post on Fast Co.’s experience at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

I think Fast Company’s results actually show something very different from the appeal of longform articles per se: since these posts began with “stub” articles and then grew over time, as more news or analysis emerged about the topic itself, I think they show the value of engaging readers by following a story over time and providing some kind of comprehensive background and context, instead of just bombarding them with a stream of news briefs.

That approach may result in longer stories, but I think that’s almost a side effect rather than the main attraction. No one is going to read those kinds of posts simply because they are long — but if a site builds a narrative and a point of view and some context over time about an issue (the mobile news-reading app Circa is trying to do this by allowing users to “follow” specific breaking news stories, and then alerting them to updates) then it pays off in engagement.

There are lessons in there not just for new-media players but for traditional media outlets that are trying to find a recipe for success online as well.

Note: This post was updated on May 14 at 12:12 am to correct the spelling of Chris Dannen’s name.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Scholastic

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Launched this morning, comScore’s “Media Metrix Multi-platform” shakes up the existing rankings in some dramatic ways. Music site Pandora, for instance, jumps from #61 on the list to #23 while ESPN jumped four slots to #19. The sports site’s jump comes thanks to the inclusion of the 35 percent of people who consume ESPN only on mobile, not desktop, devices. Other big winners included Amazon, Wal-Mart and e-Bay; the three companies all had an incremental mobile audience of more than 20 percent. Here’s a look at some of the US numbers:

The new metrics, which are based on a mix of internet tagging and census methods, also reveal that the number of so-called “unique visitors” to websites are much higher when mobile figures are included. For instance, comScore says that more than 10 websites have more than 100 million visitors when mobile stats are included (compared to only six such sites if only desktop figures are used).

comScore says its new analytics system also suggests other important lessons in how publishers and advertisers measure a website’s success. In particular, the company recommends valuing “engagement” (time spent on a site) over page views. Under the engagement method, comScore says Facebook ranked first in the mobile category.

comScore’s new metrics system is still in beta but, given that mobile consumption is an irreversible phenomenon, it seems inevitable that publishers and advertisers will have to get accustomed to the new measurements. The growing predominance of mobile also poses challenge to publishers and advertisers who are still struggling out how to extract money from smaller screens.

While comScore has offered mobile measurement tools in the past, the significance of the new product is that provides an unduplicated tally across all platforms. More details are available here at comScore’s release.

(Image by iko via Shutterstock)

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IBM said that 77 percent of mobile traffic on Black Friday came from iOS devices. This despite the fact that Comscore said that Android has 52.5 percent of smartphone subscribers while iOS has 34.3 percent. Some of it comes down to the iPad, which is still the dominant tablet and produces the most traffic compared to iPhones and Android phones. But like the iPhone, the iPad exhibits outsized usage patterns beyond its actual marketshare. Gartner said in the third quarter, iPad shipments have dropped to 50.4 percent. But IBM said it contributed 88 percent of the tablet traffic over the long weekend.

This is a pattern than has been in place over the last few years. But now that Android is now the top dog on smartphones marketshare-wise and is eating into the iPad’s lead thanks to the Kindle Fire, Nook and other Android tablets, why is iOS still so dominant?

Here are some theories we’ve gathered from around the web alongside our thoughts:

• Horace Dediu of Asymco wondered if Android was attracting more late adopters, who were prone to do less with their phones than hardcore smartphone users. But he’s not convinced that’s the answer. Perhaps, it has more to do with “design considerations” or “user experience flaws or integration.”
• One thought is that Android users are more apt to want things for free, so they’re not as likely to shop for things on their devices. We’ve seen a gap in how Android and iOS users are willing to pay for apps — Android users prefer free apps – but that difference is going down over time.
• Some Android users are just graduating up from a feature phone and really don’t understand all they can do with their device. Considering the declining number of feature phone options, it’s possible that people are graduating to cheap Android devices, but just still talk and text on them, something Daring Fireball’s John Gruber mentioned before. 
• Tim Windsor from Digitally Speaking goes a step further, saying that most iOS buyers are specifically buying their devices for the features they can access, while most Android users are just buying what’s available to them. Most, he believes, aren’t interested in serious computing power.
• Jason Grisby of Cloud Four recently wrote that the gap doesn’t exist when looking at web traffic over cellular. It’s only when you examine iOS and Android traffic over Wi-Fi that a usage gap emerges. He believes that Android users might not be aware of the availability of Wi-Fi networks through their device or are in lower income brackets and have less access to Wi-Fi networks.
• Some people believe there is no gap at the high end when looking top Android devices. The problem is with cheaper and older Android devices, which don’t provide as good an experience or are saddled with older versions of Android, which are worse at browsing. It is true there are more cheap Android phones options available, so that might contribute to some of the gap. And a majority of Android users are still on devices running Android 2.0x.
• Apple users are more likely to use apps, which can provide a better user experience. Android users who turn to a browser may not find it as inviting or engaging.
• It’s also possible that shopping data is not an accurate proxy for engagement. NetMarketShare earlier this year said, however, also came up with general browsing data that showed iOS devices have 65 percent of mobile traffic compared to 20 percent for Android.

To be clear, the data we’re looking at is from the U.S. only, and it’s based primarily on shopping traffic. My theory is that there are people who walk into a cellular store, see only a handful of feature phones available and a salesperson who is heavily pushing Android devices. If they want to walk out with a new phone, it’s likely going to be an Android unless they came in already looking for an iPhone. Those people may not be savvy now, but they will get more experienced over time. What are your theories on this Android paradox?

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But what if your biggest source of traffic and readers is something you aren’t even really paying attention to, and something that is extremely hard to track in the same way as Google or Twitter or Facebook? That’s the reality of web publishing today, according to Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic — who writes about the influence of what he calls “dark social” on engagement and traffic patterns. While everyone is busy watching Twitter and Facebook because they are easy to track, Madrigal argues that most social traffic still comes from old-fashioned or difficult-to-track sources like email and chat messages:

“This vast trove of social traffic is essentially invisible to most analytics programs. I call it DARK SOCIAL. It shows up variously in programs as “direct” or “typed/bookmarked” traffic, which implies to many site owners that you actually have a bookmark or typed in http://www.theatlantic.com into your browser. But that’s not actually what’s happening a lot of the time. Most of the time, someone Gchatted someone a link, or it came in on a big email distribution list, or your dad sent it to you.”

Most of your social traffic is hidden from you

As evidence, Madrigal provides some data from Chartbeat, the Betaworks spin-off that focuses on real-time analytics for publishers, looking at everything from the amount of time readers spend on a page to how far down they got in an article before they decided to click away. Chartbeat, which we have written about a number of times, is one of the few analytics engines that tries to break down that “direct” category into sub-categories like email and what the service calls “direct social” — meaning everything from apps (for chat or other social features) to instant messaging.

For The Atlantic, the impact of this kind of direct social traffic outweighs any other kind of social network or service like Facebook, Twitter or Reddit: according to data from Chartbeat, the magazine’s website gets almost 60 percent of its social traffic from these hard-to-track sources. Facebook is still a large referrer for the site, generating about 21 percent of the social traffic, and Twitter is also fairly large at 11 percent — but the “dark social” category is larger than all of the other social services combined, and has more than twice the impact that Facebook does.

Chartbeat’s numbers also showed that this direct-social traffic was a large contributor for other sites that the service tracks, according to Madrigal — and Chartbeat is used by some of the largest publishers in the media business, including ESPN and the New York Times. On the average, the company’s stats showed that close to 70 percent of the social traffic to these sites came from email, instant messaging, chat apps and other sources (as Madrigal points out, at many websites including The Atlantic, social traffic far outweighs traffic that comes from search, and that gap is still growing).

The one obvious conclusion to take away from all of this is that measuring user engagement and sources of traffic is probably a lot harder than most publishers think — and they likely already thought it was pretty hard. It’s bad enough that comScore and Compete and Nielsen and Google Analytics all provide different numbers, and it’s almost impossible to tell who is right (especially since all of these sources often disagree with a publisher’s internal statistics). Now there is a huge source of traffic that is even harder to measure: email is trackable in the aggregate, but how do you track instant messaging?

The only solution is to create engaging content

This problem is compounded by the shift to mobile content consumption as well, since chat apps and instant messaging and other direct communication methods are even more prevalent in the mobile world than on the desktop. Links are passed from social network to apps to chat to email, and tracking them quite quickly becomes almost impossible. That’s part of the reason why almost all web publishers get surprised by posts or stories that blow up traffic-wise days or weeks after they first appeared, with no obvious sign of how or why they hit that invisible tipping point.

So how are publishers and media companies supposed to deal with this problem? Madrigal’s solution is an appealing one, at least for those who create content — he says the only dependable way of generating real traffic and engagement is to actually write things that people care about or are interested in. In other words, the “content is king” approach. As he describes it:

“The only real way to optimize for social spread is in the nature of the content itself. There’s no way to game email or people’s instant messages. There’s no power users you can contact. There’s no algorithms to understand.”

It’s not that getting people to share content via email or chat app or instant messaging service is that different from trying to get them to share it on Twitter or Facebook — the same general rules apply, in the sense that it has to be engaging and interesting and shareable, and all of those other things we are supposed to be doing with our content. But the difficult part is that it’s hard to track in the same way publishers watch Facebook “likes” or page followers, or Twitter re-tweets and other metrics. And so it’s difficult to tell whether it’s working and why, or what you should do differently.

In a sense, what Madrigal is describing just reinforces the fact that much of what content companies do is more of an art than a science — even though social-media gurus and analytics providers would like to make it sound like something that can be quantified and measured from every aspect. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing, even if it does make our jobs harder.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user George Kelly and Alexis Madrigal

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As we’ve described a number of times, the advent of the web and social tools like blogs and Twitter and Facebook has disrupted virtually every aspect of the media industry, from books to movies. And one of the hardest hit has been the traditional newspaper business, which finds itself competing against a growing number of online entities for both audience attention and advertising revenue. In response, some publishers such as the Newhouse family’s Advance Publications have been cutting back on printing newspapers in places like New Orleans, leaving that city without a printed paper for several days of the week — and causing an outpouring of criticism.

How do we measure the impact of a newspaper?

Much of the reaction to these moves — including an open letter from famous New Orleans residents criticizing Advance and responses from media analysts such as New York Times media writer David Carr — have focused on the idea that an online newspaper can’t possibly have as much of an impact on a city like New Orleans as a printed paper can. How do we know? The short answer is that we don’t, because there is no easy or reliable way to measure the impact that a printed newspaper has on the society around it, apart from pure sales. As Stray puts it:

“Evaluating the impact of journalism is a maddeningly difficult task. To begin with, there’s no single definition of what journalism is. It’s also very hard to track what happens to a story once it is released into the wild, and even harder to know for sure if any particular change was really caused by that story.”

Newspapers have always argued that they are important because the stories they cover result in changes to legislation or in corrupt companies being investigated, or have other social benefits such as highlighting health problems, but in virtually all cases the evidence is anecdotal at best. And as Stray notes, this problem doesn’t become any easier online — where everything can and is measured — because it isn’t clear what constitutes success for any given piece of journalism. Is it the number of readers it draws, or the “engagement” they produce (via things like comments or tweets)? Can you find it by looking at the number of links to that story from other sources over time, the way that Google’s Page Rank does?

There are some efforts to try and answer some of these questions, including a project from Aron Pilhofer — a developer and head of the data-journalism team at the New York Times — that involves a Knight-Mozilla News fellowship. It’s not clear from Pilhofer’s description what exactly the project plans to focus on: he says he hopes to come up with a framework and a methodology that will allow news entities to measure something approximating their social impact. But again, the problem is what to measure. As Pilhofer puts it:

“We are awash in metrics, and we have the ability to engage with readers at scale in ways that would have been impossible (or impossibly expensive) in an analog world. The problem now is figuring out which data to pay attention to and which to ignore.”

Is serving subscribers enough, or is there more to it?

Most of the efforts at measurement that publishers have made so far consist of tracking eyeballs and responses so that advertisers can be sure they are reaching the right audience, because when you rely on ads for the bulk of your revenue that is the most important factor in your survival. But what about newspapers like the New York Times and Financial Times, which are either close to or have already become primarily funded by reader subscriptions? Surveying those readers to determine whether they feel satisfied is one way to quantify your success — but is that enough? What about the broader public mandate that journalism is supposed to have?

One of the things that complicates this whole process is the fact that “journalism” is so poorly defined in the first place, as Stray and others have noted. What do we mean we say that word? In most cases, people seem to mean investigative or meaningful reporting on global events like the war in Afghanistan or the crimes committed by hedge funds and banks. But the reality is that those kinds of stories make up a tiny fraction of the journalism produced by major newspapers and other outlets — they are vastly overwhelmed by entertainment news, “service” journalism about things like how to file your taxes, gardening columns and so on.

As news developer Stijn Debrouwere pointed out recently, much of what traditional media companies are competing with for attention and ad revenue doesn’t even look like journalism: things like Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything” features, or Tumblr’s viral content, or BuzzFeed’s animated GIFs. Those services don’t worry about what the social impact of their content is — all they care about is clicks, because they don’t have a social mandate. Newspapers don’t have that luxury, but nor do they have an easy metric to demonstrate their success.

That is going to become a crucial issue as the disruption of the industry continues to increase: How does a mainly digital media entity determine whether it is having an impact or not — or having the kind of social impact that we have come to associate with journalism? And if it can’t answer that question, then why do we need it?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Kevin Lim and Woodley Wonderworks

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App users are now abandoning apps after using them just once at a rate of 22 percent, down from 26 percent when Localytics first looked at retention rates last year. And for users who open an app more than 10 times, that figure has gone up from 26 percent to 31 percent. That suggests that app makers may be figuring out how to better encourage engagement and long-term use, rather than shooting for quick downloads.

That’s been one of the big changes in the app ecosystem, as app makers realize it’s better to retain users than push for big download numbers, which can be easily inflated. It may also be a result of the fact that many of the tools for incentivizing downloads have been blocked by Apple. That may also partially explain why iOS apps perform better than Android apps in retention.

Localytics found that among heavy users opening an app more than 10 times, 35 percent are iPhone and iPad users while 23 percent are Android users. For one-time users, Android apps also see 24 percent of their users abandon the app, while 21 percent of iOS users leave after one time. The company examined the behavior of app users on 60 million devices, comparing a nine-month period that ended in March 2012 with a previous nine-month period ending in March of 2011.

The year-over-year improvement in retention may be a result of app makers getting better at building apps, said Localytics. Users might also be more discerning about which apps to try. Also, users are downloading more apps overall, according to Nielsen, which reported last month that the average number of apps per smartphone has increased from 32 apps to 41.

As for Apple’s loyalty advantage, Nielsen also found that 88 percent of iPhone users are app downloaders while 74 percent of Android users are, another reason why retention may be better on iOS. Localytics’ CEO also told The Wall Street Journal that iOS apps may also be more polished because they’re the primary target for many app developers. iOS devices also enjoy higher customer retention compared to other smartphone makers.

There are still plenty of challenges for app makers. The numbers show that 69 percent of the time, an app doesn’t get opened more than 10 times. But for app makers, it’s clear that you need to continue to build for repeat usage and long-term engagement. With most of the monetization models for apps based on in-app purchase or advertising, it’s all about keeping people coming back to the app. The fact that people are returning to apps more often is an encouraging sign considering that the deluge of new apps is not slowing down. Maybe app users aren’t as flaky as we thought.

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The service launched in December with a dashboard that allowed people to track their own conversations from Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google Contacts and through commenting platforms Disqus and Facebook. Now, with a new engagement discovery dashboard, users can follow their friends’ conversations. They can follow their existing contacts on Twitter, Facebook and Google or they can search Engagio’s 400,000 user profiles and follow one person across all the platforms they use with a single click.

While Engagio launched with a Gmail-like interface, it’s now becoming available inside Gmail as an extension for Chrome, allowing people to see their conversations in an email folder. Some current Engagio users already get notified of comments through their Gmail account, but they can now get a filtered view of all their conversations across different platforms and a simple way to reply to any comments without leaving Gmail. Users can also compose an update or Tweet from Gmail that will appear on their Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn accounts.

Engagio is throwing in some other improvements like the ability for a user to register an unlimited number of accounts on one platform. Previously, a user was only allowed to register one account from Facebook or Twitter. This should help community and brand managers who want to follow the conversations around multiple accounts.

William Mougayar, the founder and CEO of Engagio said that what’s increasingly valuable or interesting to people isn’t so much the flood of information on social channels, but the chance to interact with a smaller number of people. He said existing tools don’t do a good enough job organizing and preserving these conversations, which can quickly get lost in the stream. And now, with the engagement discovery dashboard, users can get even more value from the conversations of others.

“It’s a stream of conversations of those that you follow,” said Mougayar. “Someone told me it reminds them of them of Friend Feed but of conversations only.”

I think it can be little voyeuristic, keeping tabs of all the conversations of people I want to follow. But that’s the nature of many of these platforms. They’re already public; Engagio just captures it all together in a single place. I still wonder if Engagio could become part of a larger product or if it could evolve into a Hootsuite or TweetDeck competitor. But Mougayar said that’s not his intention. He believes there’s plenty of opportunity in just concentrating on discussions and leaving the rest to others.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Randy Robertson

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Launched three years ago as a way of giving publishers and media companies better real-time analytics related to their content, Chartbeat announced Monday that it has closed a new round of Series B financing worth $9.5 million from a series of venture funds including Index Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The company — which was developed by New York-based incubator Betaworks, creator of Bit.ly and News.me — said it has also upgraded its analytics dashboard with new features that give websites and publishers better ways to measure actual reader engagement. And in the age of digital content, being able to do that accurately is a crucial weapon for publishers in the fight to show advertisers that their content has value.

Tony Haile, Chartbeat’s CEO, says one of the goals for the company from the beginning was to produce better analytics so that publishers could understand who was interacting with their content and when — on a page-by-page and author-by-author level — in something approaching real time. While most analytical tools for websites and publishers such as Google Analytics and specialized tools like Omniture pay most of their attention to pageviews and other page-based metrics, Haile says that Chartbeat wanted to give content creators a much more granular view of what readers were doing with their stories, and to track all that in real time.

So using the Chartbeat dashboard — which a number of major media entities like ESPN and the New York Times do — a publisher can see that a specific blog post or news story is getting a lot of readers who are coming from social media such as Twitter and Facebook, and a smaller number from search or direct traffic. They can see where those users are coming from, in real time, and how long they are spending on the page, and whether they have reached the bottom of the page or left without scrolling down.

One of the biggest differences with Chartbeat when compared to something like Google Analytics, says Haile, is that while Google and other programs only check once to see if a visitor has opened a page — and then show that page as being read until it is closed — Chartbeat continually pings every few seconds to see if the page is still open, and therefore it has a far more accurate reading of which pages are actually getting engagement from readers, as opposed to simply being open in a browser tab somewhere.

That’s important in an age where advertisers are increasingly looking for engagement with content as a metric of value, instead of just a raw page-load or browsing behavior — and are getting what they want from social networks like Facebook, which has been capturing a growing share of online advertising revenue. In another new feature, Haile says that Chartbeat also shows publishers how their metrics around engagement and social sharing compare to others in their industry (although the industry data is anonymized so no specific competitors are mentioned).

From a user’s perspective, there is just one big problem with Chartbeat: namely, that it quickly becomes addictive to be able to see the exact number of readers a post has, where they came from, and how long they spent on the page (even though in many cases those numbers may be lower than a writer might hope for). The speedometer-style dials and gauges that show each incoming and outgoing visitor, the map that updates with the location of the latest reader, and the table of posts that shift around based on which is getting the most traffic are almost hypnotic.

Chartbeat’s funding round — which brings the amount it has raised to $12.5 million — was led by Josh Stein at Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Saul Klein at Index Ventures, and Haile said the funding group also included many of the angel investors who backed Chartbeat in the beginning. In addition to Google Analytics and Omniture, the company’s competitors include startups like Go Squared and Woopra. John Borthwick, CEO of Betaworks, will be at PaidContent 2012 in New York in May.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Skyhawk4life

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Yosma first acquired a 9 percent stake of Conduit after investing $1.5 million in  2006. After reportedly trying to sell its stake to Silver Lake earlier this year, it sold off 2 percent to W Capital Partners before sealing a deal with J.P. Morgan. Conduit said the new valuation would make it Israel’s first billion Internet company.

Conduit, which allows publishers to create custom toolbars to better engage with users, has a network of 260,000 publishers with a combined audience of 250 million users. The company’s founder, chairman and CEO Ronen Shilo recently told Globes, an Israeli business publication, that Conduit is making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue annually. It bolstered its online tools a year ago when it paid $45 million for fellow Isreali start-up Wibiya, a maker of social toolbars for publishers. Conduit has also been moving into mobile with a service that helps publishers build apps and is also working on a lock-screen tool for Android devices.

Conduit, which has raised $9.8 million including an $8 million round from Benchmark Capital, was rumored to be an acquisition target for possibly Microsoft or Google at a price of more than $1 billion. But the company has said in the past it is not looking to be acquired or go public.

“As our constantly connected world continues to evolve, the ways that we engage our users must change with it. The next few months will be some of the most important in the history of Conduit, and we’re thrilled to have partners like J.P. Morgan Asset Management as our company continues to grow,” said Shilo in a statement.

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