At FM, we have a healthy mix of small and large sites. Marketers can understand the basic story of a very large site like Fark or Digg through simple reach and frequency calculations. But it's in the smaller ones where marketing might shift to different metrics. From a post today on MediaPost, Mike May makes some good points:

Online publishing businesses are most concerned with the metrics that allow them to drive the greatest advertising revenues--those that create the greatest number of ad impressions at the highest perceived value. Small publishers publish, in most cases, simply to be heard. Their end-game is not the media kit, but growing their sphere of influence. How many page views they generate, or the demographics of their readers, can't accurately measure the volume and clarity of their individual voices. The metrics small publishers should pay more attention to are those that reflect the depth of their influence....

...It's easy for small publishers, employing search campaigns, e-mail newsletters or RSS feeds to drive traffic, to get caught up in the direct response metrics these campaigns generate. They are important as a means to understand the tactics of driving traffic, but are inadequate when trying to measure influence. A better measure is through brand recognition initiatives. Buying a search ad on the blog's or writer's name as keywords will allow the publisher to see how often the search term occurs--a measure of unaided brand awareness not captured by click-throughs on targeted campaigns. And en route to building that brand, publishers should pay just as much attention to how many people are served an ad with their brand as they do to the number who click on it. While a day of five clicks on 30,000 AdWords impressions might be deflating, it also means that 29,995 prospective readers were exposed to the brand--perhaps for the first time.

One of the things that's interesting about what we are building at FM is the idea of a robust network of sites that share similar influence profiles. I'm not entirely sure what the characteristics will be of such a network, but I'm certainly looking forward to seeing it develop.

And, by the way, we'll have more news on new sites joining FM, both small, large, and in between, over the coming weeks....