The Importance of Audience

The Internet's role in growing readership continues to develop. As I wrote in November, the importance of total audience over mere circulation is a key to newspapers' survival. Audit Bureau of Circulations is now working to integrate circulation, readership and online audience information into one metric that can more clearly compare newspaper readership against broadcast metrics.

We have also recently seen the demise of some pioneering work in the field of user-generated content. Newspapers and other entities are still figuring out a workable model that might lead to all-important revenue generation, but lessons learned from early initiatives should help. Backfence.com entrepreneur Mark Potts shares some of his insights on what might make a successful user-generated, hyper-local Web site on his blog. His points are valid, though I disagree with many. Contrary to his opinion, I think these sites should be about the journalism. Sure, these types of sites need to be about community "conversation" but I believe strong journalism starts this conversation. Relying almost exclusively on citizen contributions to the conversation will set a site up for failure...or at least a lack of compelling content to sustain and grow traffic.

Research backs this up. A recent eMarketer report cited by the Center for Media Research shows that the U.S. has far more user-generated content "users" than "generators."