FREEDyourMind

Fox Rocks the Socks Off of...Just About Everybody

by Eric Feinberg

The release of the American Customer Satisfaction Index on Tuesday was dominated by one finding: people don’t like Facebook. It was covered by virtually every news outlet you can think of, from national newspapers to magazines to television to radio to blogs…it was everywhere.

But the ACSI report didn’t measure only social media sites. It also covered news websites like ABCNews.com, CNN.com, FOXNews.com, MSNBC.com, NYTimes.com, and USAToday.com. The Facebook story was pretty interesting, so I think maybe people didn’t see the big news in news:

FoxNews.com beat the pants off all the other news sites, in almost every imaginable way. 

It was FOXNews.com’s first year being measured in the Index. They got an 82 on the ACSI’s 100-point scale, the highest score any news site has ever received in nine years of measurement by the ACSI. This is huge, right? Especially considering all the grief FOXNews often gets about the slant on their reporting.

Not only did FOXNews.com get the highest ACSI score that any news organization has ever received, it killed the other cable news networks: MSNBC.com got a 74 and CNN.com got a 73 (eight and nine points behind FOXNews.com, respectively). It also killed ABCNews.com, which got a 75. And though FOXNews.com beat out print by a slightly smaller margin, it still killed the print websites that were measured: USAToday.com (77) and NYTimes.com (76). 

Here’s the real kicker: each and every one of those websites improved satisfaction since last year: ABCNews.com has increased almost 6% since last year. And FOX still left everybody in the dust.

 
What other news sites do you want us to measure? Next year, we’re considering HuffingtonPost.com (which actually has more visitors than FOXNews, according to EBizMBA.com). Thoughts? Please post in the comments.

Okay, so now that I have breathlessly heralded the total domination of FOXNews.com in the news and information category, why did it happen? 

• We survey only site users. Before anyone takes a survey, we ask them which news sites they have been to in the last three months. Then they get a survey about that news site. The result is an accurate assessment of customer satisfaction. FOXNews’ survey results reflect how their own users feel about FOXNews.com; MSNBC.com’s survey results reflect how their own users feel about MSNBC.com. Customer satisfaction scores are always a bit higher than general population satisfaction scores about any given website, because they have to have a decent level of satisfaction about the site if they’re already going there. If they hated it, they wouldn’t be going there. Imagine if we surveyed FOXNews.com readers about MSNBC.com and vice versa. The results would have been quite different. In real estate, it’s all about location; in web analytics, it’s all about segmentation. When reliably measuring satisfaction for our clients on a continuous basis, we purposefully take the aggregate insights and then segment them down to the nth segment (by visitor frequency, gender, age, intent, success, and more) so that we can bring clarity to varying satisfaction levels across differing audiences

• FOXNews users spend most of their time with FOXNews: More than two-thirds (63%) of survey respondents (site users) see FOXNews as their primary news source while FOX’s ideological counterpart, MSNBC.com, serves as the primary news source for less than half (49%) of its website visitors, online or offline. The site whose audience was least likely to consider it their primary news source, however, was USAToday.com (39%). Further, FOXNews.com visitors tend to rely solely on FoxNews for all of their news and information (inclusive of the FOXNews TV brand) whereas visitors to other sites tend to seek out multiple sources for news and information. For example, more than half (52%) of FOXNews.com users frequent fewer than two news websites on a regular basis. Compare that with NYTimes.com: only one in three NYTimes.com users looks at two news websites or less on a regular basis.

• FoxNews.com visitors may have lower site expectations: The simple definition of satisfaction is a combination of what you get and what you expect. FoxNews.com visitors’ expectation levels are calibrated by the fact that they visit fewer sites than do other survey respondents. Since they visit fewer sites and thus have less experience with other news and information sites, they could have different and potentially lower expectations. The research also shows that FoxNews.com readers are slightly older, on average, and have lower income and education levels, all of which often correlate with lower expectations, according to our research.

• FoxNews has brand alignment: FoxNews.com seems to have successfully translated the personality of its on-air brand to its website. “Great brands and products must evoke a dynamic personality in order to attract passionate customers,” said Rohit Bhargava, author of Personality not included. I would add to Rohit’s quote “…in any channel at any time.” Whether you agree with the FoxNews worldview or not, it is undeniable that when expectations align with experience, that’s a winning – and satisfying - combination. Think about your business. A tough task for any website, network, company or person is to deliver on your core and key brand attributes in all channels. FoxNews has managed to introduce its corporate personality to its audience in each channel well.

Other thoughts and findings impacting our industry: 

• The 50/50 ad spend screen shifting theory: This study is starting to prove out my long-held belief about TV’s continuing, but loosening, grip on web traffic. We ask the question, “What medium do you prefer most for keeping up with news?” When you tally up personal computer, mobile and tablet access, that total ranges from 22% to 44% (FoxNews.com and CNN.com, respectively). Once that preference shifts to 50% or more across the board, we’ll see the long-awaiting flood of media mix changes that lead to significant online investment away from TV. Our decisions, our lives, our time will be invested more online than on TV and thus we’ll see the ad dollars follow. Follow the money is what they do on Wall Street. Follow the consumer is what they do with ad spend.

 

• Advertising engagement: There is a relationship between visit frequency and likelihood to look at ads on news sites. USAToday.com and ABCNews.com frequent visitors both being more likely to look at ads than CNN frequent visitors. The relationship between visit frequency and ignoring (not paying attention to) ads is less clear. For most of the sites, visit frequency tends to increase the likelihood of clicking on ads. ABCNews.com appears to be better than many of the other sites at generating clicks among visitors who come to the site weekly or more often. For most sites, there is a relationship between visit frequency and ad relevance. This is not the case for CNN, though. Ad relevance is not impacted by visitor frequency. In general, infrequent news site visitors are more likely to perceive ads as interfering their experience than are more frequent visitors.

• Paywalls: NYTimes.com users are most willing to consider paying for content on the site (9% of users would consider paying for content on that site) while only 2% of MSNBC.com users would consider it. Consideration is by no means activation, so let’s keep a close eye on The Times of London and others considering paywalls.

Bottom line: While it’s interesting to talk about the high satisfaction and what caused it, regardless of the cause, FOXNews is sitting on paydirt. Academic studies have shown that high satisfaction as measured by the ACSI leads to more loyalty, recommendations, repeat visits, and more. These kinds of actions translate to dollars for advertisers. After all, as an advertiser, would you rather spend your money on a website with viewers that are loyal, happy, recommenders? It’s great for your brand. 

There’s a whole lot more in the report and in my head. Download the full report at our website and post your comments and feedback below (I’ll respond, I promise). What else did I miss? Why do you think FOX dominated so much, and what does it mean for news and for advertisers? Who should we add to the study next year? Email me anytime to talk more about the content, media and entertainment worlds. Thank you. Be well.

Eric Feinberg is Industry Director for content, media, and entertainment at ForeSee Results. He’s on Twitter at @ericfeinberg and can be reached by email at eric.feinberg@foreseeresults.com. 

Facebook Flops, Google Drops, FoxNews Mops Up the Floor with CNN

So you may have seen by now that the big #ACSI report on e-business was released today (hyperlink to http://www.foreseeresults.com/research-white-papers/ACSI-e-business-report-2010.shtml) with a bang.

We've been doing the analysis for the ACSI since 2002, and there is usually pretty big news in one of the measured e-business categories, but this year, there's a shakeup in all three.

First thing's first: social media. This is the first year the ACSI has measured social media, and what a debut. With an average score of 70, social media has the lowest industry aggregate score of any of online industries measured by the ACSI. Wikipedia leads the social media industry with a score of 77, and YouTube comes in at 73. Industry darling Facebook registers a score of 64, only one point above MySpace (63). Facebook and MySpace have scores so low, the only other companies measured by the ACSI with such low scores are airlines and cable companies. Facebook seems to be suffering from concerns about privacy, frequent changes to the interface, and advertising.

	2010
Social Media Aggregate	70
Wikipedia.com	77
YouTube.com (Google Inc.)	73
All Others	72
Facebook.com	64
MySpace.com (News Corp.)	63

As for News and Information Sites, the big news in this industry is the debut of FoxNews.com at the top of the heap with a score of 82, which is five points above nearest competitor USAToday.com (77) and well ahead of other cable news providers MSNBC (74) and  CNN.com (73). NYTimes comes in at 76. FoxNews registers the highest score ever received by any news organization in the ACSI.Our data shows the high score could be in part because their viewers are very loyal and don't follow as many different news sources as users to the other measured outlets. Therefore, their expectations may be a little lower, which makes them easier to satisfy. But whatever the reason for their high satisfaction, it is off the charts for a news site.  If I were Fox, I’d be using this data in my media kit, because high satisfaction leads to high return visits and loyalty, which means more eyeballs for ads on FoxNews.com.

The Portals and Search Enginescategory is usually a pretty stable in terms of who dominates the field: Google has been at the top every year but this year and in 2007 (when Yahoo slipped momentarily ahead). This year, the "all others" group beats Google, which is a combination of all the other search engines not mentioned by name in this study. This year, they tended to be niche search engines. Google itself had a 7% decline this year (down six points to 80). Bing was measured for the first time this year, and it made a strong first showing with a score of 77, second only to Google.

So what do you think:

• Can Bing actually compete with Google, even with all the power of Microsoft? Last year I would have said no; this year I think Bing might actually have a glimmer of hope.

• Does Facebook's low satisfaction score pose any danger for the company? Or like other perennially low scoring companies like airlines and cable companies, does it have enough of a specialized market that it can dominate despite low satisfaction?

• Why can't the other cable news channels come close to FoxNews.com's high satisfaction score?

I'd love to hear what you think in the comments...

You can download the free report here: http://www.foreseeresults.com/research-white-papers/ACSI-e-business-report-2010.shtmlor catch me on Twitter (@larryfreed) with any questions about the findings.

Welcome Walter Rothschild

We're thrilled to announce that Walter Rothschild is joining us to act as Chief Marketing Officer, a newly created position to help us advance strategically in the coming years.

Walter has actually been with us a little while, and we've just had such a busy spring, it took us awhile to get the release out. He's already helping us develop our brand and expand our full range of marketing initiatives.

You can read all about his background in the press release, and you'll have a chance to meet him at our upcoming user summit at the end of May in Ann Arbor. He's a great guy with experience and vision that will really strengthen our capabilities.

It's already shaping up to be a great year!

Looking Back, Looking Forward

It's a nice day to be releasing the news that we saw 32% revenue growth in 2009 because our whole staff from around the country (actually, around the continent) is in Ann Arbor today for an all-hands meeting. I'm incredibly proud of the hard work of everyone on my team--I'm proud of them and I'm proud of the work they have done for the more than 800 websites we work with today. We're a company that pratices what we preach--customer satisfaction. We live and breathe it.

Read more about it here.

We've built something really amazing here, and I'm confident that 2010 will be even better. We have new products and services being rolled out, we're going to host an amazing user group in Ann Arbor in May, and who knows, maybe a few other surprises.

Thanks to everyone for a great 2009, and here's to 2010!

How Far We've Come

Check out this newscast from 1981 about the future of online news. It starts:

“Imagine, if you will, sitting down to your morning coffee, turning on your home computer to see the day’s newspaper. Well, it’s not as far-fetched as it may seem.”

Someone from the San Francisco Examiner is quoted as saying:

“This is an experiment. We’re trying to figure out what it’s going to mean to us, as editors and reporters and what it means to the home user. And we’re not in it to make money, we’re probably not going to lose a lot but we aren’t going to make much either.”

28 years later, and people now get more news from the internet than from newspapers.

Honestly, I'm a little surprised it took 28 years.

Where Do You Get Your News From?

Back in December I wrote about the changes going on with the Detroit Newspapers.  Well earlier today I saw a interesting stat from The Pew Research Center about that in 2008, for the first time ever, more Americans relied on the Internet for national and international news then they relied on newspapers.  When looking at the 18-29 year old group, the Internet equaled Television as a main source for national and international news.

It is no surprise that advertisers are following the same trends, shifting more of their focus to the web.

The Future of the Newspaper

Everyone has probably heard by now what's going on with my hometown newspapers. The Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press have decided to limit home delivery to three days a week in an attempt to cut costs and save jobs. On other days, people can buy an abbreviated edition on newsstands or get an online subscription for $12/month.

This is huge, and I'll be interested to see if this starts a ripple effect. Will other papers wait to see what happens with the Detroit experiment or will they hop on the bandwagon, eager for any solution that can cut costs in the short term. Detroit is in a different situation than many home town newspapers though because of the auto industry. People all over the world read the Detroit dailies for auto news, almost like an automotive trade journal. So they may be able to cut home delivery with less impact than, say, the Des Moines paper or the Little Rock paper.

In the meantime, since my business is the online world, I'll be interested to see if people actually pay to read the whole edition online and how this all shakes out for them.

We're measuring online customer satisfaction for a lot of media companies, including newspapers and broadcast outlets who are seeing more and more traffic go to their websites. It's essential for these companies to know how to maximize the value of their online channel in tough economic times. We see over and over in the ACSI report on online news that there is little differentiation between online news outlets, or at least between the ones the University measures for the ACSI. There's such a huge opportunity for someone to step up and own this market.

How do you feel about this as a consumer? Are you nervous about the possible disappearance or reduction of print newspapers?