Jonathan Goldner, Senior Director of News Content, Operations & Distribution at MTV News gives his take on data as knowledge, getting away from the gut-and anecdotal-driven decisions to know more, and know right.
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“My big data takeaway is this: there are people I find who are open and receptive to all the data, and making decisions blended with their own expertise and judgment, and there are people who aren’t.
I prefer to think, let’s not think we know; let’s know we know.
People want to ask the robot: “tell me what to do,” but I don’t think that’s what you should want. What you should want is to balance your own brand principles with the data you can work with, and allow it to be the continual surprise it will always be. In that way, data isn’t threatening, it’s empowering.
It’s not a loss of expertise, but an elevated perspective of that expertise.
It helps us avoid the content people don’t want and lets us focus on what people do want. Many years ago, we were told not to worry about the data. We’d be given a few anecdotal pieces here or there, but overall, we knew basically nothing about what those anecdotal pieces even meant.
Now, however, data influences what we cover and why we need to.
At first, 12 years ago we had a serious discussion about covering American Idol. Everyone thought: that’s a contest, not real music. The first season, we did an article on the winner, but that was it.
But, as the seasons wore on, we felt the pop culture imperative, and decided we kind of had to cover it. It’s still a major ratings winner, and it does business for us. We owed it to our audience to deliver them what they’re watching and reading. And we learned a ton about our audience from covering it. What was so weird about the American Idol traffic is that most of it was search traffic.
I will say that, anecdotally, I can infer that search means new users and social or internal often means loyal, but I don’t know the exact breakdowns off the top of my head.
Of course search and new visitors aren’t the only thing that matter. Everything matters. Like the home page, obviously. How the home page works and flows and its dynamism are important. And we learned a lot about the home page design, too. We don’t need 75 links on the homepage; we only really need some relevant 10 or 20.
For us, that’s more challenging than you might think. There’s no site that does everything that MTV.com does from music videos to shows, editorial, video games, and a whole bunch of other things.
So deciding which 10-20 links are relevant is a huge challenge. Everyone is looking for the one ring to rule them all. We look to data to guide the home page design, the content for articles, the search audience, you name it. Data guides where our brand is going.”
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