Let me start this post with some disclosure. Outsell Insights is a paid subscription service that generally provides excellent information. However, a recent article is spreading FUD without really looking at the problem, because the summarization of various articles and blog posts does not tell the whole story.
The main point of the article is based on a blog post by Tom Chavez regarding the difficult position publishers are in with the change in the advertising industry. The Outsell article talks more about analytics as a whole, but the two concepts are related. How do publishers (or anyone dependent on advertising in the past) meet the challenges of the online industry? Initially, these challenges are focused on the wealth of data and how to manage it. Tom Chavez talks about one of the biggest problems:
Publishers, meanwhile, are left with dated platforms architected to manage ads, not data. Existing publisher systems simply don’t scale to accommodate the avalanche of audience data...
I would agree that the publishing industry will need to figure something out, but it is not nearly as difficult as both articles make it sound. The first question everyone should ask is "should we build a system that can help us manage the data?". This is more a question of scale, because the basic functionality in these systems is not terribly hard to implement. On the other hand, scaling this functionality is more of a black art. If your existing systems, and IT knowledge, are focused on managing advertising, should you try to branch into web analytics? Again, this can be seen as a question of scale because web analytics produces data at a very rapid pace. But, do you really need to be that concerned with scale?
First, the sites that require "100 million impressions per day" are few and far between. As an example, Compete.com measures CNN as having just over 175 million visits per month in the US, and Alexa.com has CNN getting over 3 pageviews per user. This means that CNN, one of the top sites in the world, has almost 600 million pageviews per month, or about 20 million pageviews per day.
I am not sure that many traditional publishers would have that type of traffic problem. So, that type of scale is not needed. However, web analytics data is still generated at a much higher rate than most other systems. What if your current IT staff does not know how to manage that type of data? The simple (and very popular) answer is, look to the clouds. There are several (at least 25) free analytics vendors, like Google Analytics, that are readily available and easy to implement though some have traffic limitations that most sites can live with. If you insist on storing your own analytics data, that list also has some self-hosted platforms as well. If you delve into ecommerce and the various bits of tracking desired in that industry, then there are at least a dozen commercial vendors that you can implement with only a small amount of pain, but may require a significant amount of money. Google Analytics and some of the other free providers also have some free ecommerce tracking if you are under their tracking limits.
Because of the availability and price of the cloud-based offerings, there is typically no reason for a company to worry about analytics in terms of the amount of data that gets generated, only that you include the tracking code which is normally just a few lines of JavaScript. I would not call this a fork in the road as much as the publishing industry needing to ride the same train as everyone else. For publishers making the move online with an ecommerce strategy, there are plenty of consultants that can help them with the analytics implementation, email marketing campaigns and assorted other online marketing strategies, all within the span of one quarter. The only real problem could be cost if you implement one of the commercial analytics platforms.
Many of the cloud-based analytics systems also provide the ability to export data as well. So, if you wanted to use the analytics data with some internal data, you have many possibilities as well. In reality, there is no reason to start tracking some basic web analytics right now. This does not mean you know what the data means. In some cases, it may be easier to hire an analyst that is experienced with web analytics data. Overall, there is no need to fear web analytics. There are several excellent books and plenty of information on the internet regarding what the analytics data means and how to plan your web analytics strategy.
Advertising is a completely different problem, and not one that fits into a short blog post.

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