The Difference Between Serving Your Audience and Chasing Traffic
What we learned when metrics started mattering more than mission
I've been there — watching the audience numbers climb while quietly wondering if we were still proud of what we were publishing. At Philly.com, our traffic was soaring. Sports coverage was leading the way, and we were doing everything the industry said we should do: pagination, photo galleries, auto-refresh, headlines optimized for clicks. But somewhere along the way, audience metrics started to crowd out editorial judgment. We weren't just audience-first — we were audience-only.
Like many publishers at the time, we were chasing CPMs and ad impressions. Pageviews paid the bills. And in that environment, you do what works — until what works starts to feel like it's working against your values.
The first indication was when traffic so far exceeded revenue that our sales department started making penny CPM sales in a misguided effort to drive up sell-through rates. Suddenly, the conversation wasn't about quality or even value. I mean, where do you go once you've dropped your rate down to a penny?
But on the editorial side, I think our moment was when we didn't do enough to stop commenting from becoming a cesspool. Commenting was so bad that the interns we had monitoring the comments would "joke" that they needed therapy because of what they were exposed to. The comments were so bad even years after I left that the author of a Philadelphia Magazine article devoted to the issue wondered, "Is the city really this full of hateful, horrible people? And even more sobering: What kind of 'civic dialogue' is Philadelphia reflecting to the world?"
I was actually interviewed for that article and said: "The idea was to create a community where there could be an active and lively discourse . . . What we got instead was a cesspool."
Part of the issue was volume. Comments were coming in one a minute and had grown from 5,000 to over 50,000 a month.
As Ryan Davis, who was President of Philly.com during my time told the magazine: "Fixing the comments wasn't going to suddenly make us more money that we could use to support more journalism. Fixing the comments wasn't suddenly going to get us more advertising. Fixing the comments wasn't going to create a new business model that would show us the path forward. So it was not at the top of the priority list."
In hindsight, we weren't thinking audience-first — we were thinking traffic-first. And that's not the same thing. Real audience-first work doesn't just look at what drives numbers. It asks what builds trust. What fosters belonging. What adds value, not just impressions.
Another way to look at it is that audience-first asks: "What does our audience need that aligns with our mission?" while audience-only asks: "What will get the most engagement?"
Commenting and the blind chasing of traffic may have been our biggest sins, but for the industry in general there also was clickbait headlines that eroded trust, content that performs well but damages brand equity, and today, algorithmic content that drives short-term engagement but long-term churn.
The Business Model Trap
What I didn't see clearly at the time was how the advertising model was driving us toward audience-only thinking. When your revenue depends on impressions and time-on-site, every editorial decision gets filtered through that lens. A thoughtful, well-reported piece that someone reads in five minutes? It can't compete with a slideshow that keeps people clicking through 47 pages.
The penny CPM wasn't just embarrassing—it was where this logic inevitably leads. We'd turned content into commodity inventory, creating massive traffic that was worth almost nothing to advertisers because they could see it wasn't worth much to readers either.
What Changed
It took leaving that world to see what audience-first actually means. Working with subscription-based publications and independent creators was like learning a different language. When people pay for your work, metrics tell a completely different story. Subscriber growth matters more than page views. Retention beats reach. And somehow, magically, comments become conversations instead of combat zones.
The incentives change everything. Instead of "Will this get clicks?" you start asking "Is this worth someone's time and money?" Instead of gaming the algorithm, you're thinking about the person who chose to support your work.
What I learned is that while metrics matter, they're only one kind of truth. And if you let them lead without question, you end up chasing the crowd instead of serving the public.
Today, audience-first means something completely different to me. It's about relevance instead of reach—understanding that a smaller, engaged audience often matters more than massive traffic that bounces right off your site. It's about listening to actually understand, not just looking for content ideas. And it's about building the kind of trust that makes people want to pay attention to your work, not just consume it.
What I keep coming back to is this: the difference between audience-first and audience-only isn't just about philosophy—it's the difference between building something that lasts and chasing numbers that don't sustain anything. We're not here to feed the algorithm. We're here to serve actual people with actual needs.
And honestly? That's a much better business to be in.
What's your experience with the metrics vs. mission tension? Have you seen organizations (or yourself) cross the line from audience-first to audience-only? Share your thoughts in the comments—I'd love to hear how others have navigated this balance.