Posted in Online Publishing Strategy	March 7, 2008

Your online media index (OMI) measures your print to online transition

We've come up with a neat and simple calculation that we call the Online Media Index (OMI), which measures your print to online success.

Simply take your monthly unique visitor count and divide it by your print circulation. The number should at least be 1.0, meaning the amount of traffic your website gets each month is equal to your magazine's print circulation.

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Finding these numbers is simple. Compete's free SnapShot tool provides websites’ unique visitor counts, and the Audit Bureau of Circulations will provide a publication’s verified circulation numbers. Simply take those numbers, divide and compare them to our grading graph below.

OMI’s vary greatly from one publisher to another. Forbes, in the month of February has an OMI of 12, meaning they have 12 times as much traffic going to their website each month as they have subscribing to their magazine. Forbes’ unique online content and breaking news are enough to draw this great OMI. People.com for the month of February has an OMI of 2.3, which is a vast improvement over where they stood 12 months ago, which was roughly a .8.

How did your publication do? If you are in the A to B range, congratulations, you are doing an excellent job driving your audience to your website. If your score is any lower than a 1.0, then you should consider the record setting growth that the online advertising industry is achieving and how you are going to capture that growth.