Yahoo7 and Nine's “jarring” digital ratings dispute makes “the same mistakes” of one-upmanship as the television industry and threatens to shift the focus away from what is really important in digital media at a critical time, Multi Channel Network (MCN) sales executives have warned.
MCN chief sales and marketing officer Mark Frain and national digital sales director Nev Hasan have been left bewildered by the “tit for tat” battle over “wanting to come third” that erupted between the two fierce media rivals last week.
The dispute began when Yahoo7 claimed it outperforms Nine's digital assets and was the third largest digital publisher behind Facebook and Google with a unique audience of 10.1 million. Nine hit back claiming Yahoo7 intentionally misled the market and its Nine/Microsoft network was top with a unique audience of 14.4 million.
Frain tells AdNews the debate is not only irrelevant to advertisers, but threatens to divide the digital media industry at a time when publishers outside of Facebook and Google need to come together.
“Just watching it was quite jarring, this is not where the debate should be,” he says. “We're watching the same mistakes that the free to air television industry made starting to happen in digital where one of the key metrics is becoming who's number one, who's number two, who's number three and so on.
“The real debate, from our perspective, is about smart reach. It's very easy these days in the digital economy to artificially in the short-term grow your audience rapidly, but I think things go a lot deeper than that.”
A Nine spokesperson says they are “firm believers" in smart reach and have been focused on it “for some time”.
“It is the reason Nine has sought to complement the strong data and reach it has, through our strategic relationship with Microsoft, with other data partnerships like Data Republic and also Red Planet,” a Nine spokesperson says.
“However, we do also reserve the right to correct the record when a competitor falsely claims our reach is one quarter of what it is.”
Yahoo7 reiterated its position on the matter, telling AdNews: “We stand by our audience numbers in Nielsen, which reflect only owned and operated assets. Yahoo7 does not include audiences from its extensive third party ad network, we have reported the numbers just as they appear in Nielsen under parent entities.
"For clarity, the data under discussion is for Yahoo7 alone and does not include the substantial incremental audience generated by SWM’s other owned assets.”
Do advertisers care?
A question plaguing observers of this digital stoush is whether advertisers actually care about Nine and Yahoo7's brinkmanship in this day and age.
Frain says that before the digital age when there was a limited choice of media, rankings may have had a much bigger sway on channel selection but today advertisers only care about delivery and return on investment, which “the top ten players can comfortably deliver”.
“I think it's a critical point for digital publishers outside of Facebook and Google to get the next two or three years right,” he adds.
“Getting it right is not arguing about who is third, fourth or fifth. It's about investing in our own product and looking to monetise our own content through our own platforms and being very careful of the balance between distributing our content onto other platforms where there's a short-term kick in overall reach numbers but a long-term detriment to the core asset. And we have to be very careful about that.”
Nine agrees that “Australian premium content creators” need to do a better job of positioning against “global platforms that don’t create content”.
“In our case, this is the reason that we have invested heavily in content around propositions, such as our lifestyle network 9Honey, that offer enhanced value to marketers and agencies seeking to target particular audiences and segments,” a spokesperson adds.
The problem with digital scale
A major problem with digital scale metrics is that numbers can be artificially boosted in the short-term through social media referral traffic and this isn't easy to commercialise.
Frain explains: “In the digital economy, if you set yourself a KPI to be the biggest, with the highest number of UAs then there's a very quick fix to do that, which is putting various piece of content onto social media platforms and then getting referred traffic from those platforms. It bolsters up your numbers very quickly but it's a false economy on two senses.
“Those people that are coming into a site from a social platform tend to spend less time on your platform and your average dwell time tends to decrease.
“From a media owner perspective, you run the risk of not being able to commercialise putting that content onto those platforms.”
Hasan, who heads MCN's national digital sales operation, believes digital content success should incorporate metrics that measure levels of audience engagement, such as dwell time, frequency of visitation, loyalty, number of articles read and videos consumed.
“When you wrap that into the advertiser side, they're the metrics that shift the needle when you look at brand awareness and brand uplift,” he explains.
“If you talk about scale and reach, there are multiple platforms that can deliver that but we should be looking at who the audience is and why they come to engage with the content that we create every day week in and week out.”
He says advertisers and marketers want more insights into who their audiences are and how to get the best outcomes, rather than where they are positioned.
“As an industry we shouldn't be beating each other up,” he adds. “One thing that is slightly concerning is that I've never turned up to run a race wanting to come in third.”
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