comparison

Mashable misses something in the Posterous vs Tumblr showdown

June 30, 2009 By Dan Thornton

I’ve long been a fan of Mashable amongst the top tech blogs, and this comparison of the Tumblr and Posterous services goes some way to explaining why.

They combine news with good in-depth analysis of services to show what exactly you might want to use them for – and in general this article is pretty good.

It does have one major, major, major omission, though, which is so obvious as to appear almost intentional.

When Jennifer Van Grive details the autoposting options Posterous offers, she writers:

‘a single Posterous video post could auto-post to Twitter, Facebook , YouTube and Vimeo and blog sites, while photo posts could automatically add images to your Flickr, Facebook, and Picasa accounts.’

What she doesn’t make clear is that Posterous will actually autopost to Tumblr.

That’s a major advantage to Posterous, and certainly a major element for discussion in a ‘head-to-head’ comparison.

And as you can see, it’s something I’m playing around with at the moment, with my Posterous blog, and my Tumblr blog linked.

Is Posterous taking Tumblr’s easy blogging crown?

June 23, 2009 By Dan Thornton

When it comes to 140 character microblogging, Twitter has established itself as the leader. In hosted blogging, Blogger leads the way. And if you’re hosting your own blog, then WordPress is the most common choice (as used for this blog!)

And until recently, the clear choice for someone who wanted more space and multimedia than 140 characters, but didn’t want a ‘full-on’ blog was Tumblr. I set up my own Tumblr blog fairly quickly and didn’t really develop it much, but good friend Angus has taken it a bit fair bit further.

But all that seems to have changed recently, as Posterous has launched a full scale attack of features, and has already inspired Steve Rubel to write about how the microblogging/lifestreaming approach has changed the way he blogs.

While Tumblr has introduced a popularity ranking system, Posterous appears to be everywhere. Recent updated include becoming an alternative to posting images on Twitpic and a way to turn email lists into group blogs.

Now you can import your blog to Posterous from any of the major publishing platforms – including Tumblr.

And upload video from the Apple iPhone 3G S to multiple social sites, including Twitter and Facebook.

Posterous seems to be benefitting from the ‘posting by email’ side of the site, which makes it an easy and effective way to get content online. Although Tumblr has a similar feature, it’s far less prominent when you’re comparing the services at face value. And Posterous is also targetting the distribution of that content, which is something Tumblr doesn’t seem to be doing as much. It’s very much in the vein of Twitter and Friendfeed in making it quick and easy to create, aggregate, and share.

(I’m also available on Posterous, but I’m only just starting to use it).

In fact, the only killer feature that both sites are missing is the one that I firmly believe has kept Blogger popular in the face of WordPress.com, and also Tumblr/Posterous – the ability to quickly and easily install Google Adsense adverts on a hosted platform. It’s not the sole reason for someone choosing to blog, as we always like to focus on the desire for self-expression, but it’s an important issue for a lot of people. Even if common sense suggests hardly anyone will make any significant revenue, the hope factor is as important as in buying a lottery ticket!

If I ran Tumblr right now, I’d be introducing a similarly quick and simple Adsense system to Bloggers as quickly as I could!

Not writing about not comparing print and online audiences…

April 15, 2009 By Dan Thornton

I had an amazing response to my previous post, ‘Why it’s dangerous to compare print figures to website stats‘, including a good follow up post by Martin Belam, the invitation to repost and start contributing to the Online Journalism Blog, great comments from Dave, Neil and Andrew, and most impressively, Martin Lengeveld updated his original post with a link and details of my post.

Inspired by all of this, I’ve decided to take the undoubtedly risky approach of not only poking holes in the arguments of others, but to try and maybe answer some of them – but that proved more difficult than expected, (partly due to the epic victory of Chelsea in the Champions League game vs Liverpool last night)

Initially I started brainstorming measures that could be broadly equivalent with some work – could the effort of walking to a shop and paying for a print copy be judged equivalent to reading a website? Commenting? Subscribing via RSS?

But then I got hit by a far more fundamental question.

Why are we trying to compare print readers and online readers in the first place?

And it’s a serious question.

Because if you run a publishing business, you’re going to make judgements about print and online on revenue. And scale in both mediums is a byproduct of an advertising model based on number of eyeballs, usually within a target location/demographic, or from being able to attract flat rate advertisers by being able to claim the largest readership.

The actual scale itself doesn’t matter once we’re in the same ballpark and seeing trends in readership over a reasonable period?

Or am I missing something?

Or are we trying to find figures to justify editorial or marketing resource? Or refocus online media commentary?

Only when the reason for the measurement is clear is it going to be possible to try and devise a method for comparing ‘domestic print apples and global multimedia organges’ (quoting Mr Belam).

I’m actually heading off to a Twitter-based event called Aperitweat tonight, organised by good friend @tojulius, so I’m hoping great food and conversation will fuel something closer to a conclusion rather than more questions! (Apparently you can watch the event live on Ustream– I’ll be the scruffy one…)

And I’m also hoping to keep the brilliant contributions coming from Dave, Neil, Andrew, Paul Bradshaw and maybe Martin himself to produce something from my hopefully constructive criticism – and if not, perhaps just an agreement to never compare print and online audiences directly again?

Why it’s dangerous to compare print figures to website stats

April 14, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Although hardly newspaper/print apologists, both John Duncan and Martin Langeveld have posted interesting articles trying to compare the print/online split in newspaper readership in number terms. Duncan comes in with online having 17% of page impressions on Inksniffer using the Guardian as a case study, while Langeveld posts that only 3% of newspaper reading happens online.

While I totally agree that it’s easy to overestimate the online figures in comparison to print products, and both articles are good reality checks, I have to say that I think comparing print and online readerships directly in this way is equivalent to comparing the number of people who drive cars with the number of people with vowels in their name.

And touting the eventual figures is very dangerous.

For starters, the readership of print titles rests on research figures for average shared readership of titles. For instance, the metrics John Duncan quotes are:

From 2007:

Average daily UK uniques for Guardian website: 270576 (after discounting overseas readers etc).

Average UK sales of Guardian/Observer: 310788

But then the UK sales figures is multiplied by 3 to take into account shared readership, becoming 932,364, on figures available by the Guardian.

Meanwhile Langeveld refers to an engagement study from the Newspaper Association of America conducted in February 2006, based on 4594 respondents to a survey.

Now shared readership definitely happens, and without being able to actually see what people do, rather than what they claim, it’s impossible to be totally accurate.

But…

If you’re taking shared readership of print products into account, then surely you’d also need to factor in people reading newspaper website content without ever being logged as a visitor to the site?

That includes people blocking cookies, people using RSS, people reading reposts of newspaper content (Great example of the spread of multimedia news by Martin Belam by the way), people reading content via aggregation sites and site scrapers etc, etc.

And by the time you’ve taken into account all the vagaries of print readership figures (which aren’t a bad guide to something so difficult to measure), and then taken into account the vagaries of online measurement (Less inaccurate, but still pretty fairly vague), and using data and research from 2+ years ago (But that’s probably the most recent readily available) it starts to be apparent that quoting a an exact figure is pretty irrelevant – especially when some people will undoubtedly take it as gospel.

After all, two years ago, Facebook didn’t have 200 million users, Twitter had just launched, there was no iPhone, there was less broadband penetration in the UK, there hadn’t been events like earthquakes or Mumbai to highlight realtime information, etc, etc.

And there’s a big elephant in the news room: Whoever said that print newspaper readers were guaranteed to only be getting their online news from newspapers?

I can get digital news on my mobile or my PC, via text,audio or video, and via social networks, blogs, websites, link aggregators, RSS, podcasts, videocasts, and from global sources. Whether or not print titles are only seeing a small percentage of their print readership visiting them online is less relevant, than how many of those readers are getting news content online from any source.

So what can you do?

When it comes to looking at the situation now and for the future, the numbers are far less important than looking at data trends. I’d much rather base a theory or business strategy on a few years of data showing a rise in one area and a fall in another. The numbers are rough guides to point towards when the trends are in the same area, but that’s all.

Just to reiterate, I don’t want to criticise John and Martin for doing what is a useful, if flawed, exercise to highlight caution in assuming that online readership is bigger than it really is, or that print readership is smaller than you might think. As I tried to comment on the Nieman Labs site (sadly it vanished into cyberspace after I submitted it), it’s the way the information is being presented that worries me.