I’m not sure you’re aware of quite how many things get “backed into CPMs” at larger publishers/advertising companies… for a Denton specific example, check out this craziness:
it makes sense to me that as Boing Boing would be very familiar with the publisher side of “CPM” as used in display. Certainly Abramson could have given a better introduction to CPMs. But this doesn’t read as a gaffe like you say. The other criticisms of the book are much more potent. My two cents as someone who works with revenue at a media company.
If anything, I’m struck that the article you linked could well be what “Abramson” read (and misunderstood) to create the paragraph in question, as the article refers to CPM and uses a novel derivative of the “Cost Per n” metric to analyze the traffic rubrics then in play at Gawker.
Let’s compare Denton’s Ratio to the numbers generated by another money-for-audience scheme in use on the Internet: online advertising. After all, lots of ads are sold using roughly the same language Denton uses: the M in CPM stands for thousand. Except it’s cost per thousand impressions (a.k.a. pageviews), not cost per thousand new visitors , which would be much more valuable. What Denton’s talking about is more like CPC — cost per click , which sells at a much higher rate. (Those new visitors aren’t just looking at an ad for a story; they’re actually reading it, or at least on the web page.) Except it’s even more valuable than that, since there’s no guarantee that the person clicking a CPC ad is actually a “new” visitor. Let’s call what Denton’s talking about CPMNV: cost per thousand new visitors.
I suspect that Nixon though himself terribly clever for saying that. It only “worked” if you were constitutionally charged with executing the laws against yourself.
The New York Times has never been in that position.
Thanks for expanding on this, and thanks to Gbaji too for bringing it up. I worked this idea into this week’s Fake New York Times parody comic on my NYT parody website (right-hand article subheading): http://fakenytimes.com/33
I love creating my art with the people who are most affected by its subject (and in this case, insightful about it too), so it was great to find this thread.
