Technology360

#Pubmedia web ranks vs. inbound links

Updated 12 July 2011: See also Building web usage for pubmedia - challenge for TV and music radio.

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Available web statistics tend to overstate the broadcast equivalent of cume and understate the broadcast equivalent of average usage (and therefore time spent using). If broadcast usage was counted like web usage, you would be counted as two in your cume if you tuned in on two radios or TVs in a given rating period. Each browser you use to access the same web site counts as a “unique.” The disappointing web performance we see for too many public media web sites is even more so in reality.

I’d suggest we’re looking at the wrong thing anyway. Inbound links (also called backlinks) drive traffic because search engine algorithms consider them a sign of respect. Given the large proportion of your traffic that comes from search engines, strategies that encourage backlinks will move your digital performance in the right direction.

This scatter chart comes from public data I looked at for the top 52 television markets – New York through New Orleans – for both radio and television (some markets are missing).  The two dots in the upper left side are for NPR and PBS. In general, it shows that the higher number of sites linking in, the higher you are (lower number) in traffic ranks (both are power curves, hence the log-log scaling). The metrics are from an Amazon subsidiary called Alexa, which relies on data generated from installed browser toolbars and, as of 2008, from other unspecified sources. It’s rankings get some criticisms, but for our purposes it displays the relationship.

The following table shows organizations having more than 1,000 inbound links:

PBS | 612 | 45,831 | 0.40
NPR | 230 | 41,797 | 0.36
WNYC | 6,606 | 4,017 | 0.53
KCRW | 4,977 | 2,706 |0.48
KQED | 8,646 | 2,655 | 1.05
WNET | 37,350 | 1,935 | 0.26
WAMU | 36,986 | 1,586 | 0.66
WGBH | 16,712 | 1,349 | 0.55
WBUR | 7,827 | 1,338 | 0.54
KPBS | 25,604 | 1,266 | 1.16
WHYY | 47,901 | 1,200 | 0.40
WBEZ | 13,492 | 1,086 | 0.31
KUOW | 59,389 1,044 | 0.56

Left to right, the first number is Alexa Traffic Rank, the second is inbound links, and the third is links per 1,000 TV households. Note that all of these top-ranked stations are either radio or joint licensees – content and relationships for radio stations carrying the NPR news magazines definitely drive backlinks.  Excluding NPR and PBS, the median rank = 176,654, median backlinks = 255, and median backlinks per 000 = 0.19.

Other observations:

• Having multiple URLs lowers your “Google respect.” A broadcaster in one market in the teens has one URL for radio, one for TV, and one corporate. In the aggregate, it has a semi-respectable 0.43 backlinks per 000 TVHH, but radio alone (its best performer) has 0.24, TV 0.12 and the corporate brand 0.07. Because these backlinks are distributed among three URLs, it won't get the benefit of the aggregate number.
• Also – though this needs some more data – sites using “old school” station-dot-org URLs seem have better backlink performance than those with longer corporate brands. One stand-alone radio station in a market in the twenties has a puny 36 inbound links at its corporate ID URL, but nearly five times that at the station-dot-org URL it no longer uses (it redirects to the main ID). 
• Lastly, classical music radio stations (I looked at WFMT, KING, KUSC, WGUC and WRR) do significantly worse than stations with the NPR news magazines. This may be in part due to the source of data that Alexa uses, or perhaps classical demos just don't use the web. More on this in a later post.

--Dennis (post updated 11 July 2011)

#Pubmedia orgs launch web apps for Chrome browser

Kudos to @KQED, @PBS and @NPR for pioneering implementations of web apps for the Google Chrome browser.

First, congratulations to @KQED, and particularly to one of our top innovators, @TimOlsonSF and his team, on the launch of the very cool KQED Video web app for the Chrome browser. From Chrome, it’s accessible through the Google Chrome web store.  KQED’s implementation features its own productions served up through YouTube -- but a very clean and unobtrusive implementation of YouTube. My only complaint is that when you hit the back button during playback, it dumps you out of the site, requiring you to re-enter the site to view more.

Congratulations, too, to Jason Seiken and his team at PBS for the PBS Kids Video and PBS Kids PLAY! apps, and to Kinsey Wilson and his team at NPR for the NPR for Chrome browser. Job One will be to get my daughter in Wyoming to download Chrome for Mac and the PBS apps for my grandkids and the NPR app for herself and her husband.

Web apps are going to be huge, duplicating or even exceeding the experience one gets on a tablet in a web browser. 

Although I tried it almost as soon as it came out, I’d not really spent much time with Chrome until a few months ago, but now for reasons other than its app store (largely its ability to do search in the URL window), it’s up all the time. The web apps it supports are sure to make it an even more frequent choice.  --Dennis

P.S.: KQED’s app shows up as a “Popular” choice in the “News and weather” category.

Study: Online video viewing shifting to primetime | #pubmedia

Erick Schonfeld reports on a new Yahoo study that shows the disappearance of a gap in online viewing caused by live TV that was present in 2009. He writes:

... Only two years ago, prime time showed the biggest dip in online video viewing as people turned off their computers and turned on their TVs. But now, more people are streaming TV shows and movies from services like Netflix and Hulu, and they tend to watch those videos during the same time period they previously watched regular TV. ...

Link: TechCrunch.  

Seems that even non-cord-cutters are displacing live TV with online content. Tip of the hat to Steve Bass for the link.  --Dennis

Over-the-air TV households: the real numbers from TVB | #pubmedia

On four different occasions since early 2004, I’ve used information from the Television Bureau of Advertising web site (click “Cable & ADS” on the right navigation) to determine the number of households that use over-the-air reception (OTA) exclusively (that is, not counting antenna reception by secondary and tertiary receivers in wired cable and ADS homes).  The term ADS refers to SMATV, MMDS, large-dish satellite, and DBS, and currently 30.6% of the 30.9% total ADS households are DBS subscribers.

On a tab labeled “ADS and Wired-Cable Penetration by DMA,” you’ll find for May 2011 a table of the 210 Nielsen DMA’s which contains a column labeled “% Cable and/or ADS” (there being a small percentage of homes that have both). If you subtract the numbers in this column from 100, you’ll get the OTA numbers for each market. No need to use some lame telephone survey to estimate this as the Consumer Electronics Association did in December 2010; TVB.org has it for just a little copy/paste work in Excel.

The first time I did this using November 2003 data, OTA-exclusives came up to 19.7M households. My most recent effort prior to this week used September 2006 data, and that showed 14.6M households (13.1% of TVHH). The one I did yesterday showed 11.1M households (9.6% of TVHH).  ADS is now at an all-time high, so the addition of local channels to DBS has resulted in another decline in OTA.

So, yes, it’s falling and, yes, it’s gotten pretty low as a nationwide average.  That’s some higher than the 8% in the CEA’s phone survey mentioned above that’s gotten some circulation (e.g., “Spectrum Reform Now” in The Technology Liberation Front blog).

From a public policy standpoint in a democracy, a national average of doesn’t mean a lot if there is a high “standard deviation” in the numbers that make up the average – and that’s the case here.  There are 535 members of Congress who get to weigh in on what to do with spectrum policy, and when the Boise DMA has 30% OTA usage (antennas exclusively), four members of Congress get to have a vested interest.  Ditto, when Los Angeles has 720,000 antenna-only households (13%), about 30 members of Congress have a vested interest. As L.A. proves, it’s not just rural markets – 15 of the top 50 DMA have 12.5% or greater OTA-exclusive usage. On the other hand, Congress members in New York City, Connecticut and Massachusetts might wonder what the fuss is about.

It’s that political complexity, fueled by the fact that OTA homes have a greater economic impact to stations (especially for public television which has underwriting and individual giving driven by viewing) than do homes with multi-channel programmers – perhaps double the value per household by my own guesstimate.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that freeing up additional wireless spectrum from broadcasters and others – voluntarily and properly compensated – ultimately is a good thing because services on multipurpose devices wireless and wired internet provides will be at least as important to broadcasters in the not too distant future as broadcast spectrum services will be. We broadcasters need it as much as anyone.

But let’s get our data right and make decisions based on understanding complexities, not over-simplifying for political expediency.  Thanks to the TVB for their goldmine of information.  --Dennis

FCC has released its new state of the media report | #pubmedia

The FCC's new state of the media report called, Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age, is out today and can be accessed here:

http://www.fcc.gov/info-needs-communities

The report's principal author is Steven Waldman, former editor-in-chief of Beliefnet.com, who has served since 2009 as a senior advisor to the FCC on this project.

If you don't want to download the whole 5-mb pdf, you can download smaller ones.  Public broadcasting takes up all of chapter 6 and part of chapter 31.

This will take several hours to review but from a cursory look, seems worth the effort.

--Dennis

Radio station values beginning to eclipse TV’s in #pubmedia; TV spectrum implications

When I was managing public radio and television stations in the Pacific Northwest, I used as a decision-making tool what might be the effect on the imaginary equity value of our organization of this or that significant decision. It tended to move me in a “build” or new product direction, sometimes to the patient consternation of my excellent team. I found it helpful as one of multiple indicators.

Equity values are determined by a lot of things, including market forces largely outside the control of management. We’ve all been concerned about declining television audiences while public radio audiences have continued strong, so I suppose it was inevitable that station equity values in the two media would meet at some point.  There is now evidence we’re there and it has significant implications for the FCC’s effort to free up spectrum for wireless services.

Yesterday, it was announced that Nashville Public Radio has purchased a second station in Nashville for $3.35 million plus full time access to one of its HD Radio channels (congratulations to Rob Gordon, his board and team).  Reports say it will be a classical music station.  Link: Nashville Scene.   In television terms, Nashville is the 29th market with just over 1 million TV households.  It therefore paid $3.22 per household for Vanderbilt’s student-managed station.

In the recent past, we’ve seen the sales of public television stations for $3 million each in Pittsburgh (the 24th market with 1.16M TVHH) and Orlando (the 19th market with 1.45M TVHH).  Pittsburgh’s was not the primary PBS station, but Orlando’s was – and that market had two secondary stations.  So, the Pittsburgh station brought $2.58 per household while, more recently, Orlando’s brought only $2.06.

All of this may lead a gloomy television station exec to look at the possibility of a whole or partial sale to the wireless industry as a good thing.  Perhaps that’s so if you’re sitting on a pile of debt you need to quickly liquidate, but these valuations wouldn’t produce much as an endowment investment. The median of 864 college and university endowment investment returns was –18.1% in 2009 (source: NACUBO). Things are up from there, of course, but even a long term average of +5% seems optimistic these days.  So, if that $3M spectrum sale produces only $150,000 per year and you can’t net better than that with more traditional revenue sources from that spectrum, you’ve got some pretty serious problems.

There are other factors, too, that make a sale to wireless problematic. It’s likely, said the CTIA and CEA in an FCC filling, that they can get all the spectrum they need through repacking and will need to resort to auctioned spectrum only in the top 30 markets (full disclosure: I’m executive director of the Public Television Major Market Group, but the usual disclaimer about these being my own opinions applies). Further, one presumes that the marketability of your spectrum will vary by where you are in the UHF TV band, with a preference for spectrum that can be contiguously aggregated.

--Dennis

Misunderstanding public broadcasting in the U.S. | #pubmedia

One of the difficulties that public media face as they struggle to maintain tax-based and viewer/listener-sensitive income is that the recommendations of so many people betray a misunderstanding of the very structure that exists in the U.S.  This even includes our most distinguished supporters.

Case in point is an article in the April Atlantic by the great Newton N. Minow, the former FCC chairman in the Kennedy Administration and a former PBS board chairman and author of the famous “vast wasteland” speech. Surely he would get it right:

…we need to give greater support to public radio and public television. Both have been starved for funds for decades, and yet in many communities they are essential sources of local news and information—particularly public radio, which is relatively inexpensive to produce and distribute and is a valuable source of professionally reported news for millions of Americans. There is virtually nothing else like it on the air. Public-television stations, as I saw when I was the chairman of PBS, are overbuilt, sometimes with four competing in the same market. Where that is so, stations should be sold and the revenue dedicated to programming a national news and public-affairs service, built on the foundation of the splendid PBS NewsHour. And a crucial part of that service—as with public media around the world—should be to promote the country’s arts and culture. [emphasis added]

Well, not really. Here he calls for the 30 or so independently-owned overlapped stations to be sold (requiring 30 separate sales) with the money aggregated somehow (sorry, Licensee, you can’t use it to fund other problems you have), to enhance a program service that probably none of the 30 carry now. At the announced sales price of public TV stations in two top-25 markets, that could raise roughly $90 million, which, invested after sales costs, would generate about $4 million per year – again if, miraculously, you could somehow aggregate it. The CPB base grants these stations have would be easier to aggregate and yield more – $12 million per year – but then we have the problem of the remaining 140 or so eligible recipients also feeling the big hurt and needing relief. Even if these problems could be solved and the money aggregated, it’s too small.  While not chump change, is a long way from being sufficient to build the kind of service Minow envisions – even if it was done far more cheaply in radio or on the web.

Mr. Minow is one of public media’s most distinguished and articulate champions, but this misses because it misunderstands the nature of what brings NPR, PBS and other programs to Americans every day.

--Dennis

Jessica Clark’s [@beyondbroadcast] “Pubcasting Battle” series | #pubmedia

Jessica Clark (@beyondbroadcast on Twitter) has added a post to her “Pubcasting Battle” series on the Center for Social Media Blog.

April 16:  Pubcasting Battle: Unlikely Bedfellows

Here are the others, all worth your time.

• April 5: Pubcasting Battle: Government Shutdown Edition
• March 30: Pubcasting Battle: Sifting Through the Evidence
• March 23: Pubcasting Battle: Top Five Pieces this Week
• March 17: Pubcasting Battle: Highlights and Low Blows from the Past Week
• March 9: Pubcasting Battle: Breaking Responses to Schiller's Ouster
• March 8: Pubcasting Battle: Now it Gets Ugly
• March 3: Pubcasting Battle: A Slight Reprieve, and a Push for Reform
• February 22: Defend or Defund? Advocacy Ramps up as House Nixes Pubmedia Budget
• February 14: Public Broadcasting Faces Harsh Congressional Challenges

--Dennis

Martin Busch, public broadcasting pioneer, died today | #pubmedia

 

My good friend and professional mentor, Martin Busch – died today in Kansas.  He began his broadcasting  career at KUSD-AM in Vermillion, S.D., and was executive director of South Dakota Public Broadcasting from 1960 to 1984.  Along with his engineering colleague, Jim Prusha, he built a statewide network of public television stations and began a statewide public radio network as well before his retirement – which itself was a statement of principle with a former governor.

Martin and his friend, the late Jack McBride, from whom he took inspiration, were among the pioneers of regional broadcasting – efficient operating models for rural states that now increasingly look like efficient models for the rest of public broadcasting.

I saw Martin last in October when South Dakota Public Broadcasting dedicated its television studio to him.  In spite of suffering from one of the insults of old age (I think he was 89 87 in March), he gave a nice speech and, as always, looked debonair.  Here is the citation for this event on the SDPB web site:

On Friday, October 1, 2010, during the USD Dakota Days celebration, SDPB dedicated our TV Studio in honor of Martin Busch. Martin was the Executive Director of SDPB from 1960-1984, and hosted "The Bookshop" on SDPB Radio from 1960-2002. Speakers included Julie Andersen, Executive Director of SDPB; James Abbott, President of the University of South Dakota; Ted Muenster, former member of the ETV Board; Dr. Tom Kilian, an early supporter of SDPTV; Stephan Busch, Martin's son; and Martin Busch. View the ceremony here: MARTIN BUSCH STUDIO DEDICATION

RIP, friend.

Update 18 April 2011:  Rapid City Journal article on Martin.  Thanks to Ron Hull and Burnie Clark for updated picture and news article link.  South Dakota Public Broadcasting's "Dakota Midday" 4/18/2011 program on Martin.

--Dennis

Moyers: test case for #pubmedia disintermediation?

Yesterday evening, I sent the following on Twitter: “BM: If anyone doesn’t need common carriage, it’s you – Go direct…”  This is an expansion of that thought.

A few days ago, I published a guest post by Howard Blumenthal of MiND TV on public television and disintermediation.  By the standards of this modest blog, it got a lot of attention, including some thoughtful comments.  Then I read Elizabeth Jensen’s New York Times piece saying that Bill Moyers had ended his effort to return to PBS with a weekly series because: “PBS has informed us there is no time slot available in which the series could be designated for simultaneous common carriage across the country. …”

I’ve spent 38 of my 41-year career in stations and now in semi-retirement work half-time as executive director of a station organization, so I certainly believe in the value of local stations.  And I’ve argued for the power of common carriage in both the station community and as a former PBS board member.  But we can’t deny the disintermediation that’s going on all around us on multiple platforms and we need to figure out how to make it work for public media.

There’s a lot of room between denial and embracing, but it seems to me that if anyone could be successful in doing self-distribution – going direct to viewers – it’s Bill Moyers.  Unless his proposed show’s content would be fishwrap a few hours later, he has the brand, following, and (probably favorable) demographics to make disintermediated distribution work.  Amazon, FORA.tv, Hulu, Netflix, Roku, YouTube and many more are all waiting – not to forget non-common carriage public TV distribution via American Public Television, etc.  And a plethora of social media tools can both get the word out and encourage the conversation that Moyers’ programs have always generated.

--Dennis