For content creators, viewership and engagement are key metrics used to validate our creations. In many cases, some of our biggest fans hide from the metrics that we use to track them. This could be by clones of our YouTube videos, viewing articles via RSS, watching TV through unofficial channels, etc.

Is it likely that we are forcing content creators to lose focus on their most inclined fans simply because their fans are untrackable?

To address the first question in the lede, sure, if you subscribe to an RSS feed, there's almost always going to be things that you'll get that you don't want, but it still "costs" me less time, clicks, and effort. Scanning one-line headlines in an RSS reader is far faster than scrolling down through a webpage + chrome that has a paragraph summary per article. I don't think there's an RSS feed I've ever subscribed to where I've clicked every single item (my highest are webcomics with 91% expansion, and my highest news feed is only 60% expansion, followed by a middle ground of 30%).

While my initial inclination is to say Yes, that is correct, I have to point out that it is fundamentally a problem with the metrics popularly used to measure 'success' with online media (hits, page views, likes on Facebook, twitter followers, etc) which look for demonstrable quantitative volume rather than quality audience engagement.

These content creators want to keep their jobs, or use those metrics to demonstrate their popularity and relevance so they're often forced to appeal to lowest common denominators, and engage in hit-mongering and link-baiting.

By using RSS we skew those numbers, and yes, we drive content creators to produce content for the lowest common denominator, but its their metrics that are at the root of this.

I don't have a huge amount to say on this topic past "I don't subscribe to any of the Gawker sites" for reasons exactly like this. If your site is all over the place topic-wise, it is unlikely that I'll subscribe to you (unless I happen to know you as a Person).

LoL was my gawker subtext that obvious?

This isn't Gawker specific and nor is it specific to the tech industry. I think all media producers are currently suffering with the online world developing schemes to get the content without adding their +1 to the metrics, and content creators are focused to shift their content away from the main viewers and to the people providing the metrics.

This topic is far reaching and doesn't only apply to "made for web" content, but really all content that is consumed. If the metrics we use for tracking content are circumvented by our target audience, do we create new metrics or aim for a different audience?

I think that is exactly what is needed. We need to use different metrics for different audience segments in order to get a better picture of how content is being consumed. Content publishers need to learn to appreciate these more and understand how the material they publish is being consumed and spread.

To some extent newspapers have already done this. They know they most people reading their papers don't buy them, papers get passed around to multiple people, that there is value beyond the day of publication, and that they don't have an exclusive on much or any of the content. So if they were to measure their success merely in terms of copies circulated they would be doing themselves a disservice and they'd degenerate into tabloids.

In the discussion of Newspapers - are you sure that their target audience isn't actually in fact "people who buy newspapers" and not "people who read newspapers" ?

Yes, look at how much they undercut their costs with low pricing, often even free. They don't make their money from sales.

But most of their tracking is done through subscriptions and papers distributed, is it not? Sure they aren't doing views, but there is still a very tangible metric there.

I would argue that 'views' for a newspaper is similar to 'conversations' online. you and i can both know about content on Website X. maybe they made a cool image. we've all seen it. We have a big discussion about it in person, on a message board, etc. It gets downloaded, reposted elsewhere. Mabe it inspires more content creation. ...

But Website X doesn't know or care since they don't get pageviews from this. Yet in the long run their brand is adding value and will get more traffic as a result.

With newspapers, being known for having good or exclusive content is perhaps more important than actually having good or exclusive content.

There are systems that can add RSS feeds and publish content that discriminate. eg muro.juuntos.net

sorry, in english: There are systems that can add RSS feeds and publish content that discriminate. eg muro.juuntos.net

I want to challenge the basic idea that viewership and engagement are the only metrics, or that they are even likely to be good metrics for a content creator. Youtube demonstrates regularly that quality is not a factor in high viewership or high engagement (if you measure engagement in terms of either forwards or comments).

These metrics were created by the advertising industry to justify what I consider to be the mass delusion that advertising is effective and use views as a poor proxy for people caring.

What I'm reading here is that content creators want to use advertising to justify their value. Lots of traffic and high "engagement" means people are seeing ads, which means they get paid more, and that means they must be better than folks who don't do all that.

Yet, we now see a pushback on this notion. When a comic strip raises half a million dollars on Kickstarter ( kickstarter.com ) to remove ads from its pages, that tells you something about what people really value about the content.

My view is that the days of advertising-supported content is coming to a close. Not quickly, but it's happening. Advertisers are becoming more reluctant to put money behind promotions where they can't measure revenue results.

Publishers are pushing back on the notion the disruptions that advertising demands in their experiences. (We're seeing page-refresh slideshows starting to go away, for example.)

And, most importantly, the readers/watchers/users are choosing outlets where the advertising is minimal or removed entirely. (Look at Readability or Instapaper.)

So, is viewership and engagement really the place were we measure the value of content?

Nietzsche stopped producing content shortly after his 44th birthday. At age 42, to see Jenseits von Gut und Böse printed, he had to pay for it. Content producer Nietzsche never earned a dime. But the influencer Nietzsche was/is a huge success story. He had and still has a vast audience generating a considerable billings.
It seems therefore that the speed of content distribution is important. The speed seems determined by access facilitators, active or passive ones.
So you seem to say that content should attract access facilitators and content can do this via intrinsic qualities.
Therefore to produce successful content we must know the content preferences of access facilitators.