As part of my research for Beyond the Dashboard: 14 Case Studies in Newsroom Metrics, I asked media companies how their data analysis has changed in the past year. This question yielded some interesting responses.

Among those:

• The New York Times broadened and refined its engagement metrics, including more time-based measurement, and placed a greater focus on analysing multimedia, including video and audio.

• Mediahuis is now focused on subscriber attention time and no longer pays close attention to raw pageviews without any quality indication.

• The Times and The Sunday Times introduced a new engagement metric, called quality reads, which shows the percentage of readers that made it halfway through an article. Other companies also had similar takes on the importance of understanding reading time vs. article length. 

• Axel Springer shifted away from looking solely at volume metrics to focus on quality metrics like read-through rates, time on site (vs. expected time on site), and engagement rates with elements like videos, podcasts, or quizzes that are placed within an article.

• The Wall Street Journal substantially updated its metrics in the past year by introducing a full suite of metrics (subscriber interest, purposeful reach, and conversion rate). They also engineered these metrics to update in real-time. 

• Hearst is focusing more on engagement, engagement experiences, habit areas, and higher-converting areas.

• Bonnier News has narrowed its focus to be more specific in what they look at, including fewer KPIs.

• Rede Gazeta has pivoted away from total volume to adopt KPIs that are intentionally related to their strategic business and product objectives.

• Stuff works to identify trends to draw more robust conclusions instead of simply looking at data in isolation.

• Aftenposten used to pay more attention to conversion rates but now prioritises how content performs among subscribers. 

• Verdens Gang continues to adjust its goal-setting framework to align with business outcomes, notably focusing on young adults (ages 25-34) as a key target audience. 

• Politiken is looking more at AI insights because they think it needs to be explored.

• Jagran New Media has introduced diverse dashboards to analyse niche aspects of data, providing insights from overall performance down to individual author-level metrics.

Taken together, these responses point to a few key themes:

• Raw pageviews are no longer a key metric for many media companies. Instead, they’re focused on engagement — and not just time on site but more sophisticated measurements of how their audiences are responding to their content.

• Media organisations are smartly tying their analytics to their business outcomes. Interestingly, as digital subscription businesses become more mature, the focus is shifting from simply trying to gain conversions to how subscribers are engaging with the products.

• Analytics are not solely being used to analyse stories and are being used more intentionally on other forms of content, like videos and audio.

The report also includes where these media companies plan to go next with their data analysis, so read the full report, free to INMA members, for more.

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