Two words – behaviour and currency – are the essence of the ”behavioural currency” term:
Behaviour:
Behaviour is your entire digital DNA and identity. Your online intents and your journey. It is about your interests. Your sex, your gender, where you live, your age, family, friends (and enemies). What you are consuming – yesterday, today and in the future. What kind of car you drive. Your profession. Education. Salary. Hobbies. Where do you like to travel on vacation. In conclusion the artefacts of everyday life.
Currency:
The knowledge about this behaviour equals a currency that could be used to trade or gain a competitive advantage.
Behavioural Currency is about being relevant, about understanding and prediction. Too summarise; it is about having a 360 degree view of your audience and to take action on this knowledge.
This blog is about understanding ”behavioural currency” for you as an online publisher. How can you use the knowledge about your audience to increase revenue? Revenue for a publisher equals advertising, subscriptions, campaigns, loyalty and consumption of your online inventory. The paramount is to build a strong behavioural currency underpinning it´s business to deliver a superior user experience to efficiently monetise it´s audience. In addition it is about protecting your currency versus competition to secure that they are not able to arbitrage. You should understand your own ”behavioural currency” better than anyone else.
Unfortunately, the best actors in today’s ”behavioural currency game” is not the publishers of the world. It is the new kids in the block; Google, Facebook, MSN, Yahoo, Amazon.com, LinkedIn etc.
Almost 11 years ago, John Battelle, wrote a blog post about ”the worlds largest database of intentions”. The main character in this blog post was Google; knowing everything about you. Using their knowledge to build one of the strongest and fastest growing companies in the history.
Google are still doing great! Every day they are improving their ”behavioural currency”. Thousands of some of the best ”data scientist” in the world are employed with Google. The famous web-cartoonist Randall Munroe was asked to find out about the actual size of Google´s data: He came up with the amazing number 15 exabytes. In perspective, Boston Consulting Group, estimated the total amount of digital data in the world back in 2002 to be approximately 5 exabytes.
Think about this for a while! – Today Google maintain a knowledge database 7-8 times larger than all the data in the world back in 2002. This is a behavioural currency hard to compete with!
Back to John Battelle concluding: ”This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind – a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, supoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends. Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture, but is almost guaranteed to grow exponentially from this day forward. This artefact can tell us extraordinary things about who we are and what we want as a culture. And it has the potential to be abused in equally extraordinary fashion.”
If you take a look at the leading online newspapers in the world. How many scripts ”stealing information” about their ”behavioural currency” do you think they have on their websites? The answer is probably bad news: Most of them have at least 5-15 scripts where information about their audience is captured. Do you think all this information is captured and analysed for the exclusive use and knowledge for the site owner? Think again! Putting a Facebook script on your premium source of digital revenue, will that just benefit your online publication?
Hopefully you can use this article to inspire and challenge your colleagues and management to focus on the importance of ”behavioural currency”. It will require change in strategy, leadership, investments and underpinning technology.
The Behavioural Currency blog 