Ask HN: Are we giving up on the web for digital content?

1 point

9 years ago

Obviously we are not _completely_ giving up on using the web for publishing, but in working with a variety of customers (e.g. major brands with millions of visitors), I am seeing a shift toward social not just for distribution, but as the entire content experience. With Facebook Instant Articles, Google AMP, and all of the native video features of social apps, a number of publishers are finding that a big portion of their audience never even hits their website: they simply watch and/or read the content in Facebook, google search results, on youtube, etc.

I don't mean to pretend the idea of Facebook-as-browser is a brilliant new one. I ask this more as a service provider. If I could only pick one area for deepening our analytics tooling, which one would you choose?

A. Analytics tools for on-site content. Some examples of newer challenges here are tracking for native and interactive ads, embedded video tracking, audience analysis, etc. An example of recent investment in this area is a guide I wrote on native ad tracking. An example investment I'm considering is an analytics extension for prebid.js that allows you to track header bidding results.

B. Analytics tools for off-site content. Extensions for FB Instant Articles, Google Amp, that allow you to grab custom events off your content engagement in those channels. An example of an investment I'm considering here is adding our service as a built-in analytics option for FBIA and Google Amp.

Which would you pick?

Refs

Example custom ad guide: https://keen.io/docs/compute/custom-ad-performance/?s=ahn

Prebid.js header bidding: http://prebid.org/

FB IA Analytics extenstions: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instant-articles/analytics

AMP Analytics extensions: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/ads/amp-analytics