The Financial Times has a terrifically-titled piece by Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson today – A want to break free – which looks at how the news industry could properly monetise online content.

“How much would you pay to read this page? At around 2,000 of the roughly 50,000 printed words in a typical copy of the Financial Times, it should in theory be worth about 4 per cent of the newspaper’s cover price – 10 US cents, 17½ euro cents or eight pence.

To readers particularly interested in the subject, perhaps, it may be worth more. To others, though no journalist would like to admit as much, it will be worth nothing.”

While the debate over how to monetise online content is an interesting one, that’s not what this post is about. I’m more interested in Andrew’s comment that an article is worthless to some readers, and hence they don’t read it. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a little while; it it possible to calculate how many people have read an article online and use that as a way of measuring PR?

The FT has more than 860,000 unique monthly visitors, according to Gorkana, but I refuse to believe that all those people read every single article on the website. While some articles will be read by thousands of people, many won’t. Simply because some topics are more niche.

So, here’s the big idea. If the media were to share website analytics such as the number of unique hits each article gained and  how long those visitors had spent reading each page,  PR’s could provide their clients with an accurate number of views for each piece of online coverage. But what’s in it for the press? Well, they could sell this data to PR’s, via a clippings agency perhaps. The press get an extra revenue source and PR’s get a way to provide clients with more advanced measurement. Win-win? What do you think?