{"id":4292,"date":"2014-04-10T13:55:10","date_gmt":"2014-04-10T13:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/media.am\/online-news-media-confused-by-changes-to-armenian-web-resources-rating-site\/"},"modified":"2014-04-10T13:55:10","modified_gmt":"2014-04-10T13:55:10","slug":"online-news-media-confused-by-changes-to-armenian-web-resources-rating-site","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/newsroom\/2014\/04\/10\/4292\/","title":{"rendered":"Online News Media Confused by Changes to Armenian Web Resources Rating Site"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The reaction of Armenian online news media to the change in Armenian web resources rating site <a href=\"https:\/\/circle.am\/?go=rating&amp;sl=en\">Circle.am<\/a>&#8216;s strategy was not unequivocal. Some leading websites simply quit Circle.am.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Circle.am is going to become a quality rating of Armenian websites. It will be built by both moderators and webmasters,&#8221; said Circle.am founder and director <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/avetisavagyan\">Avetis Avagyan<\/a> in an interview to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.itel.am\/am\/news\/interviews\/6195\/\">itel.am<\/a> [AM].&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>On Feb. 24, 2014, Circle.am moved from a quantitative to a qualitative rating platform. Previously, the platform measured and provided data on visits of those websites that had registered with the site. Now, a website&#8217;s rating is based on the scores awarded by moderators and webmasters. &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>According to <a href=\"https:\/\/circle.am\/?go=support&amp;sl=en\">information on the site<\/a>, the moderators are &#8220;well-known Armenian media and IT professionals&#8221; who work anonymously &#8220;to avoid all kinds of pressure and influence from Website owners. They are unbiased and impartial.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Moderators and webmasters rate registered sites based, in part, on the following criteria:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Overall quality and quantity of content made for Armenian users or users interested in Armenia&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>Presence of Armenian-language content, quality of the language<\/li>\n<li>Freshness and uniqueness of the content\/ideas&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>Design and technological advancement&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>Usability and accessibility<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The recent changes on Circle.am were not completely clear to some online news media previously registered on the site, which is why many of them quit.<\/p>\n<p>One of these sites was News.am. According to News.am agency coordinator <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/yartakex\">Artak Yeghiazaryan<\/a>, the reason they left is the vagueness of the criteria.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Since its inception, News.am has participated in the Circle.am rating system, when it was just beginning to develop. From the start, we&#8217;ve used and continue to use international tools for measurement, but we believe that it&#8217;s worth joining an Armenian platform for the development of the Armenian segment of the Internet. After the latest changes, the agency stopped participating in Circle.am, since for us, it&#8217;s inexplicable what they are measuring and who is doing the measuring,&#8221; he says.<\/p>\n<p>News.am uses Google Analytics for marketing, but, according to Yeghiazaryan, if another Armenian measurement system is developed, using a different logic and format, the agency will join it.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Circle.am&#8217;s new rating criteria is unclear also for Tert.am, which is why the Armenian news site also terminated its membership.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s incomprehensible what principles they are guided by; it&#8217;s especially unclear who are the people making assessments, and whether there isn&#8217;t an element of subjectivity,&#8221; Tert.am&#8217;s chief editor <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/skhachatryan\">Sasun Khachatryan<\/a> tells Media.am.<\/p>\n<p>Tert.am, as before, now too continues to use Google Analytics.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>According to Khachatryan, the change to the format of Circle.am had a positive effect on media.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Of course, there is still stress, since we&#8217;re dealing with the news, but there isn&#8217;t that artificial race as before. And best of all, the quality of journalism has increased slightly \u2014 the earlier cheap tricks to accumulate &#8216;clicks&#8217; are no longer employed, though occasionally you can still come across such content,&#8221; he says.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Aravot.am likewise has not renewed its membership to Circle.am, though the website is still registered on Circle.am and is second place among the top 10 &nbsp;in ArmNet.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Securing a top place on Circle.am was never a goal for us, especially considering that a website like Hetq.am is in the last places, while empty sites are in the top. We simply took note of its data. And now we don&#8217;t monitor it at all because if then there was some sort of explanation (visits), now the measurement criteria is incomprehensible and the experts compiling the ratings are unknown,&#8221; Aravot.am editor <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/annaisr\">Anna Israelyan<\/a> tells Media.am. &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>According to her, advertisers likewise were not guided by the statistics on Circle.am.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;They [advertisers] wanted data from us from Google Analytics. And even if it was assumed in the case of Circle.am that huge figures would influence advertisers, I can testify based on our experience that the Circle.am figures didn&#8217;t have an effect on knowledgeable advertisers,&#8221; she says.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Circle.am founder Avetis Avagyan didn&#8217;t wish to comment on the changes to the site. He told Media.am that he doesn&#8217;t yet consider it appropriate to give an interview on the new system.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>In media expert <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Kornelij\">Samvel Martirosyan<\/a>&#8216;s opinion, since the change in Circle.am&#8217;s strategy, competition between Armenian news websites regarding traffic has decreased.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Websites having many readers spread content with unhealthy, sensational headlines less [than before]. Furthermore, I can assume that the amount of money website owners spend on Facebook advertising went down by several times,&#8221; he says.<\/p>\n<p>According to him, the change to Circle.am has not yet reached its purpose, but it&#8217;s an interesting attempt in terms of assessing the content of websites.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\"><strong>Anna Barseghyan<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The reaction of Armenian online news media to the change in Armenian web resources rating site <a href=\"https:\/\/circle.am\/?go=rating&amp;sl=en\">Circle.am<\/a>&#8216;s strategy was not unequivocal. Some leading websites simply quit Circle.am.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Circle.am is going to become a quality rating of Armenian websites. It will be built by both moderators and webmasters,&#8221; said Circle.am founder and director <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/avetisavagyan\">Avetis Avagyan<\/a> in an interview to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.itel.am\/am\/news\/interviews\/6195\/\">itel.am<\/a> [AM].&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4287,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-newsroom","author_posts-anna-barseghyan"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4292\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}