The Use of Audience Metrics at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Catherine Young, whose focus is the rise of of journalism metrics – audience engagement can not be measured considerably more closely by news outlets, and this influences editorial decision-making as well. Catherine looks at this in the context of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s mobile news services; ABC News provides a Facebook Messenger service, as well as pushing short news updates to services like Apple News and its own mobile app.

Public broadcasters are in an interesting position in relation to metrics, as they are chasing cultural capital more than economic capital in their engagement with the audience – yet metrics remain ever-present at the ABC, and the organisation reviews metrics on its news on a daily as well as live basis. There are large screens in newsrooms that display ChartBeat live metrics, and there is a strong emphasis on concurrent viewers sessions (size of audience) and engagment time (length of engagement).

News alerts to readers are evaluated against these metrics – do they lead to a rise in these metrics? Messages and alerts are seen as natural ways to attract an audience, and responses from audiences to such alerts (thumbs up or down as well as written feedback on Facebook Messenger) are monitored closely. Messenger alerts also enable a two-way conversation with some audience members, and allow the organisation to source Vox-pops from its readers.

Messenger has some 680,000 subscribers now, and these are highly loyal to the organisation; Apple News 1.8 million, but as an aggregator app its readers are more disloyal and scattered; and the ABC app has 1.1 million users who are considered to represent a more conventional ABC audience. News updates are carefully crafted to these different audiences, and the guiding question is whether audiences for any one of these three channels would actually want to receive a particular update. Performance data from the main ABC News Website are also used in assessing the utility of a particular news story for different audiences.

But this also creates a rich-getting-richer effect – popular stories on the Website thus become even more popular through their further distribution. The instant spike in readership following an alert is seen as a ‘sugar rush’, and while efforts are made to avoid a narrowing of the news variety, this might still focus in only on specific types of news.

Overall, ABC News Digital advocates for audience-led decisions that lead to the telling of stories that matter to its audience. Decisions are based on a deep understanding of audiences, combined with audience metrics.