Helping Publishers Profile 'True Audience'

By: Carl Sullivan "It's not about page views anymore, it's about people." That's the manifesto of Dave Morgan's new firm, True Audience. Morgan, the founder and former CEO of the New York-based online advertising firm Real Media, launched his new company in late July.

A year ago, Web publishers only cared about the size of their audience. "You didn't have to worry about what kind of people you were selling to your advertisers," Morgan said during a recent interview at his new company's offices -- where his startup is working in space rented cheaply from an ailing dot-com on 34th Street.

Today, many advertisers could care less about thriving traffic and clickthroughs. "Publishers have to know who their audience is," Morgan said. And they have to be able to show advertisers who the audience is comprised of. "Pages and clicks were based on the Wall Street-funded Internet," Morgan added.

Morgan likened True Audience to a circulation system for online publishing. "We have to have true counts and auditable counts of Web visitors, plus real demographic information on these visitors," he said. Morgan said True Audience will collect audience data, manage it, and help publishers exploit it.

Data will be collected from publishers' servers and matched with offline databases such as print subscriber lists. "User registration on Web sites is a strategy, but it's not required," said Morgan, who doesn't believe the current push to make Web site visitors pay for news content will work. Newspapers can collect a great deal of demographic information without requiring site registration, Morgan noted. This can be done through contests and other special features that collect limited data from consumers.

If hired by a publisher, Morgan said the first thing he would do is look for those sections that can be "exploited first." While many newspapers have plenty of unsold advertising positions on their sites, they might have one or two sections that consistently sell out at premium rates. Some papers might always sell the inventory for their online business and travel sections, for example. "What publishers need to know is where else do these visitors to these sections go," Morgan said. "If 20% of the visitors to the travel section also visit news, then I can upsell the news section to travel advertisers. Our system lets publishers think about [advertising] inventory as people not pages."

True Audience will conduct beta testing at Weather.com and Advance Internet, which runs the Web sites of Advance Publications' newspapers, owned by the Newhouse family.

Atlanta-based Weather.com, a division of Weather Channel Enterprises Inc., hopes to consolidate the information gathered in its Web logs, advertising logs, and demographic files. "Right now from our Web logs, we know how many people are going to our local weather pages but we can't crosstab that with the demographic information that people have given us," said Joe Fiveash, senior vice president of product and business development. "The ability to do reporting against multiple data streams that are currently siloed is what we're after."

True Audience will cost most publishers around $150,000 to start, plus annual fees, but Morgan may eventually offer products for small publishers.

The company is initially being funded by Morgan and Bradford Burnham, the company's chief financial officer. Burnham was previously a general partner of AT&T Ventures.