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Amid all the news about how Facebook and Google are devouring the world , I would like to sound a note of optimism for digital news media. But first, let's acknowledge the bad news. It is true that the munch munch munch you are hearing is the sound of the Internet giants biting off big slices of the digital advertising pie . However, much of that has been at the expense of traditional news media. There is an opportunity for digital-only news media to fill the gap in local coverage. In the short term, this is not something to celebrate, since the decline of newspapers in particular has led to a big loss in watchdog journalism on the local level. The chart below, which has been published widely, shows the rise of Facebook and Google's advertising revenue concurrent with the decline in newspaper ad revenue. With information from Thomas Baekdal @baekdal and Ben Thompson @benthompson of Stratechery.com. Read more �

Anyone who has studied the metrics of the internet in any detail knows about the Big Lie : those big numbers of total users and page views that everyone relies on are practically meaningless . More than half of the visitors to websites stay for less than 15 seconds . Three-fourths of the users of the most important news sites in the U.S. visit only once or twice a month . How can you even consider them users? Half of the internet users in 26 countries are getting their news through social media rather than the originating news sites themselves, according to the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2016. 43% of social media users don't know where the stories they read originally appeared . Jon Slade of the Financial Times In other words, millions of clicks or millions of users are not an indication of trust in a particular news brand or loyalty to that brand. We need new metrics, better metrics. Versi�n en espa�ol So it was heartening to see this reality affirmed by of one ...

According to eMarketer , half the digital ad spending this year will be on mobile , a total of $29 billion. Advertisers want to know if their messages are reaching the right target groups of people at the right time so that ad dollars are not wasted . Some people are better targets than others for messages about, say, infant car seats, or trips to Mexico, or eye makeup, or Hummers. It is not a simple matter to measure Internet traffic, whether on the web or on mobile apps. But metrics matter to advertisers, who use them to determine the amount they are willing to pay for having their messages in a digital publication. (Versi�n de este post en espa�ol) Advertisers want to know not only the size of the audience, but its characteristics -- income, location, interests, spending habits, hobbies , and more. But for technical reasons, it is difficult to track a single user across all the devices they may use at home, at work or on the go -- smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop. Cookies,...