En-Score June 08: Bread & Circuses Win Out

In June the En-Score for the Australian Internet hit 345.55, up from 307.12 in June 07. As a refresher, the En-Score is a measure of online engagement, whether across an entire market, a single industry or specific site. The score is a reflection of audience ‘quality’ as opposed to a pure audience metric detailing the number of people (or browsers) visiting the site. The hypothesis is that any digital channel should have a single point of reference indicating depth of engagement, not just the size of its audience.

In the context of the broader market, this score is also a fair indicator of the average household’s dedication to the Internet vis a vis other media options, particularly television. As the index moves north of 400 some very serious questions have to be asked regarding the inevitable decline of engagement with other media types. Further cross-media analysis is certainly warranted on this issue.

For digital publishers, in particular, this continued upward trend in the market’s En-Score is an important indicator that the medium is taking a larger slice of the attention economy - to the detriment of mainstream media.

Breaking down June’s aggregate figure into specific verticals, such as news, entertainment, finance, automotive, careers, real estate and multi-category commerce, illustrates very comprehensively the overwhelming domination of entertainment as a digital genre (en-score: 23.8) - more than three times the engagement associated with news (6.8) and finance (6.9), and more than twice that of e-commerce (11).

Within the entertainment category, the star performer is TabOnline (14.5), followed by nineMSN Games (9.2) and iTunes (5.7). In the music sub-set, iTunes has a slight lead over AOL Music (5.2), but a significant lead over Yahoo!7 Music (1.7) and BigPond Music (0.15).

Compared with the top entertainment sites, the news category pales in comparison and doesn’t bode well for the sector. The top performer in June was Fairfax (2.9), followed by News Digital Media (2.3), the Weather Channel (1.8) and nineMSN News (1.2). Interestingly, the En-Score for the Washington Post was 1.2, well ahead of some Australian online news services, including BigPond News (0.4) and Yahoo!7 News (0.4).

12 months earlier (June 07) the news category had an En-Score of 6.3, compared to the current figure of 6.8 - a difference of 8%. Over the same period, the medium’s En-Score rose 12.5% (from 307 to 346), suggesting that over time online news providers are loosing share in the attention economy comparable to their offline peers.