Blog Post

Value your audience

Measure Internet Behavior Of Your Future Customers

Unlock The Secrets Of Your Audience To Know What They Do With Your Band Online

Every customer starts as an anonymous spectator. A nameless face in the crowd. Just a few seconds ago, they had never heard of you.

But you gave them the opportunity to experience something. And rather than scroll on by, they paused. Something connected in their brain and they considered. In that moment, somebody joined your audience.

Your audience is the group of people who watch, listen or read your public event. They gave their time and attention to your message. They made an investment in you.

People engaging and participating with your brand makes your audience valuable.

Your Internet Audience

Enter the biggest event of all time. The Internet is a worldwide public event that never ends and everyone is welcome. The Internet is bigger than the NFL, Indy 500, or Taylor Swift. The Internet is bigger than Christmas.

Every minute of every day, billions of people are on the Internet. And everyone is just a few clicks away from your online brand. Everybody on the Internet has a chance to join your audience.

So what should you know about your Internet audience?

There are over four billion people on the Internet. Most are not your customers.
Of the four billion only some will have the opportunity to ever see your message
Of those people who see your message, only some will respond
Of those people who respond to your message, only some will be interested

Within your audience of interested people lies all of your future customers.

Think about this. In only three behavioral segmentations we went from the entire Internet population to a precise, separable, and reachable audience of people that contains all of your future customers.

Imagine your Audience Funnel as:

Impressions

🠟

Sessions

🠟

Goals

At the bottom of this funnel is separate and distinct population of people that contain all of your future customers.

Future Customers Show Interest First

It is probable that there will be future economic benefits from your Internet audience.

We can also reliability measure the size of your Internet Audience. Using analytics, we can report audience demographics, interests, affinities, locations, and languages.

We can report from where people in the audience were acquired. These can be sources like social media, search results or paid advertising.

We can report what people did on a website like where they started, what they did, how long they stayed, and where they left.

Intangible Assets

International Accounting Standards has a criteria for recognizing and measuring intangible assets. IAS 38 was first issued in 1998. It has been revised and amended over the years and is the current standard for reporting intangible assets within financial statements.

IAS states an intangible asset is an identifiable non-monetary asset without physical substance. An Internet audience is a unique and identifiable list of user agent (browser) events. Events are records of user agent requests made to a web server. An Internet Audience is an asset where it is a collection of browser requests made to your website.

IAS states that an intangible asset is identifiable when it is separable, or when it arises from contractual or other legal rights. An Internet audience is separable where it a list of events that occurred. The separation is the list. An Internet audience is the result of only requests that were made to a website.

Most web requests are made by browsers controlled by individuals. Individuals associated with Internet audiences have rights. Two examples are the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The rights extended by these regulations further clarify that Internet audiences are intangible assets.

We have now demonstrated an Internet audience satisfies the requirements for an intangible asset for being identifiable and separable. However IAS standards state that it is difficult to distinguish the costs for generating intangible assets, like customer lists, from maintaining or enhancing an entity’s operations or goodwill.

The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) took this conversation a step further and issued an interpretation called SIC-32 Intangible Assets - Web Site Costs. SIC-32 states that a website can be recognized as an intangible asset if, in addition to complying with the general requirements of IAS 38, the entity can demonstrate how a website will generate probable future economic benefits.

Ecommerce websites have it easy in demonstrating the ability to generate future economic benefits. They generate revenue. The Income Statement might have a line item called something like “Online Sales” and that should take care of it.

Websites used as destinations for Internet advertising are also intangible assets. Advertising has costs associated. See our post on Accounting For Advertising The Internet audience was attracted to website. Behaviors of people showing interest were recorded as events on the website. The Internet audience is the demonstration of probable future economic benefit for the website. The Internet audience is a separable, identifiable population that includes all future customers.

Why is all this important?

The economy is shifting toward service and technology-based companies. Intangible assets are increasingly integral to a company’s financial statements. More and more, management, investors, auditors, and regulators are seeking to understand the fair value of intangible assets