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WHITEPAPER
Understanding YourLive Audience
AGuide to Real-Time Audience Analytics 
By Scott Anderson
 
 The Live Audience is a Different Audience
 T
oday's digital journalists,newsroom man-agers and content execu-tives are a bit like actorsmoving from the controlled world offilm to the real-timeenvironment ofthe stage.Ask an actor who has moved frommovies to live theatre and they  will tell you they are completely different things.On camera youhave the flexibility ofdoing many takes to perfect a scene. The stage gives you one chanceand demands real-time attention,awareness and interaction with the audience.
 As the actor Michael Caine puts it:"The art of cinema acting is the exact opposite ofstage act-ing.In the theatre you have to be as big andbroad and loud as possible… Film acting,onthe other hand,is about standing six feet from acamera in blazing light and not letting the tiniestbit ofacting show.”Ifyou're making a movie orpublishing a newspaper,youhave time to get it right.Nosuch luck on Broadway or theInternet;the audience is aliveand expectant.You need to pay attention to it.There are noopportunities to do things over.No longer able to simply stock-pile and perfect content for thenext day's newspaper or the nightly broadcast,today's content organizations have been thrustonto center stage in front ofa live audience with no second chances.And,unlike the theatre,this audience is there all the time - 24/7.
“Data analysis has moved  from being a required skill in media companies' finance departments to being an essential part ofthe resume  for editors, writers and designers.” 
 Tow Center for Digital Journalism
Understanding Your Live Audience
AGuide to Real-Time Audience Analytics 
publishflow.com 10
 
 Yesterday's Audience is Yesterday's News
 A
s they move from creating content thatis distributed at fixed points in time tointeracting with live audiences,journal-ists,managers and executives,like good stageactors,need a deeper connection with the peo-ple they are trying to reach.But,unlike actors,they can't see the audience;they can't sense themood.Without immediate feedback,they can't“play”to the audience like any good actor will.Content creators have always invested heavily inunderstanding their audiences,but reports thattell you what content people were engaged withyesterday or,in the past week or month,doesn'tdo much to help you understand what's happen-ing now.And “now”is different - content is nota static thing,it changes all the time.Newsdoesn't wait..Understanding live,dynamic audiences requiresreal-time data that hasn't been readily accessibleto newsroom editors,managers and contentexecutives until very recently.Online,you have just a few seconds to capturethe reader's attention.You have to get the con-tent right,right now - not tomorrow.Fortunately,there are new tools that can giveyou a real-time understanding ofaudience inter-est as they are reading,watching or listening tocontent.These tools put a “live lens”on top of every piece ofcontent that allows contentteams to understand content trends as they arehappening.Better understanding ofcontent trends leads to:
G
More relevant content creation andpublishing choices.
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Money saved by investing in the right-content all the time
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Increased ad revenues by publishing high-interest content The most important content success metric isstill page views - they give web producers,news-room managers and executives a good sense of how relevant or “sticky”their content is.
R
eal-Time audience analytics enabled the Vancouver Sun to act quickly when astory they posted online about a dirty nuclear bomb started to spike.“Drudge picked it up,” says then-deputy-managing-editor Paul Bucci, who instructedthe newsroom to immediately start building a package of content to complement thestory.“If you are looking at an opportunity with Drudge in that kind of window,” Bucci adds,“you want to load it up with as many bells and whistles as possible because 400,000page views can turn into a million page views.“As content is consumed and shared and spread around there is an exponential factorof increase that grows by making the content more sticky.”
Real-Time, Real Benefits
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