TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Shawn Blanc:

To put it simply: you can no longer measure value by pageviews, impressions, or subscribers. And so it’s folly to build a site that uses those numbers to measure its success.

As publishers, we should be building our websites and distributing our content with the goal of earning trust, not numbers.

Shawn is right. Pageviews don’t say much—they’re a signal, at best, that something you wrote is getting attention, but it doesn’t indicate whether it’s getting attention from the people you want.

If we are going to use advertising, though, and we are focused on trust in a specific niche, we need some way of quantifying how well our content is doing. Aaron Mahnke had an interesting suggestion for what to measure:

I was thinking the same thing this morning. I think the new metric will be how much conversation your content generates.

Great idea. But instead of just measuring “conversation,” which could simply be how many links you receive from other weblogs and mentions on Twitter, we should measure who is discussing it and who subscribes. If we know what niche the website is a part of, and who is important in this niche,1 then we can also measure how well a website’s content is being discussed.

It isn’t that numbers aren’t useful, but rather that blunt measures—pageviews and subscribers—don’t indicate how well respected a writer is in a specific community, which is what’s important for advertising. But if we know who’s important in that community, counting links and Twitter mentions is useful. They shouldn’t be the sole factor for deciding how successful a website is, and how much they should make from advertising, but it would help.

1. How important someone is is relative to the niche. They do not necessarily have to be incredibly well known to be considered important. [↩]