“How many users have we got?” How many UK users have we got?” How many page views do we get per UK user?”
From a reporting point of view this is fine but from an editorial and production point of view this is a year to stop thinking about users and start thinking about an audience.
The mindset we are in when thinking about users is nondescript, impersonal, cold and distant. We need to do something to readdress this relationship.
The problem exists across the online publishing industry, because we are now so used to reporting ‘user’ numbers our products are developed to serve the need to build these user numbers and not foster an audience of readers and viewers. Users find our content through a search engine, decide if it’s what they are after, quickly read/watch it then leave, most likely returning to Google to start another search. My worry with this sort of user behaviour is that there is clearly no engagement with the brand, which we would traditionally have seen with an audience that perhaps subscribed to a magazine or picked up the same newspaper everyday.
The future of all brand aligned commercial or digital subscription activity will be built on the solid foundations of an engaged audience. With this in mind I believe the transient users entering from and exiting to Google are losing value faster than an investment in the Dubai property market.
