In a discussion held in Cannes, I sat down with Jason White, chief product and technology officer at The Arena Group, and Johanna Bergqvist, general manager of the managers at The Rebooting partner EX.CO. A part of the conversation that resonated was how White has zeroed in on revenue per session as what he calls the “God metric” that prioritizes session depth over raw page views. This is a recognition that traditionally digital media publishers have focused on eyeballs without understanding the intrinsic value of user engagement.

"The days of not knowing the value of your audience and your content are kind of gone,” Jason said. “Marketers forever have had CRM experts; they know their audiences, they know the value of their users, the value of their products, their margins, etc. We've played an eyeball game for the past 30 years in digital media."

The benefits:

• Organizational alignment. As highlighted in The Rebooting and WordPress VIP’s recent research, internal misalignment bedevils publishers. Different groups pursue different goals. The horror show of many webpages is a sign of internal misalignment and “shipping the org chart.”
• True personalization. There’s no personalization without understanding the person. RPS allows The Arena Group to figure out not just how best to serve visitors – “Is this a younger audience that wants to consume video?” Johanna said. “Let’s take them down more of a video path." – but how best to make money from them. Publishing is increasingly a game of finding the high value audiences within a mass of impressions.
• Resource allocation. The more-with-less era is a reality. It requires making hard choices about where to spend and where to cut. Having alignment on a KPI makes these choices somewhat easier, if no less painful.