Economists love the numbers. For some companies, the numbers that are most important are the ones that say how many clicks and hits they’re getting on their website.
“ComScore.com is definitely one of the many metric sites we look at for sure,” says Jim Bankoff, CEO of Vox Media. “ComScore reports monthly. We have metric services that report in real time. We can literally look at a dashboard and just be obsessed with what’s going on, who’s looking at our content and how many people at any given moment.”
So how interested are companies like Vox Media in having people understand the numbers by which they do their job?
“We make money by growing our metrics and those metrics are largely transparent,” says Bankoff. “For instance, you can go to your favorite website and see how many people shared your favorite article on Facebook or Twitter. A lot of these metrics are now transparent and we’re making them more transparent. In our case, our ratings are transparent to our advertisers too.”
Is there such thing as too much data?
“Absolutely,” says Bankoff. “We like to tell our people that they should be data-informed as opposed to data-driven.”
Bankoff says that although the numbers allow companies to produce content in a more targeted and efficient way, technology should be used to assist the story telling and assist the consumption, not replace it.
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