Engagement is a ratio, and a ratio is not a fee

Engagement arrives in this magazine as a percent. I did not compute it from likes and followers of my own. I print the figure that was on the public card, and I use it as the first sort on a subject page, a place page, and a list. Then I break ties with average views, and then with followers. The methodology page says the same thing in fewer adjectives. This note is about what the percent is, and what I refuse to let it mean when someone is trying to agree a price.

A ratio gives a small room a fair chance. Twenty attentive people can outrank two million quiet ones, and sometimes they should. I like that. I have been the small room. A ratio also flatters noise. A tiny audience and a burst of replies can print a number that looks like devotion, and a brand that pays devotion rates for a burst is buying a photograph of a moment. The other way is just as common: a very large audience prints a modest percent that is, in absolute replies, a crowd. This is why the profile still shows followers and average views beside the rate, when I have them. One column is a poor portrait, and it is a poor invoice.

I compare some people with a median, and only when the field is a short number. Plus thirteen percent is a fact I can show. A sentence in that column would be a claim, and I would leave it off. The value three hundred percent is a special case. It sits on a great many rows, and a few more say three hundred percent and upward. That pattern is a ceiling in the source, not a measurement that hundreds of people landed on the same extraordinary ratio. I find this funny in the way a stuck printer is funny, once. Then it becomes a pricing hazard. The median tool leaves the ceiling out. On a profile I still show the printed characters, and I say they are capped. If you crown the ceiling, you are paying a limit of the spreadsheet.

Some rates are above one hundred percent. A handful are far above it, into numbers no ordinary reading of replies-over-followers can support. I do not correct them. I do not have the posts, so a correction would be a fiction, and a fiction with a percent sign gets believed. I print the recorded figure, and I keep those extremes off the lead of the issue. The lead has to be a person with a believable audience, not the winner of a broken column. If a rate will not survive being read aloud, do not build the fee on it.

None of this is a grade of the work. A high ratio is not a recommendation, and a low one is not a scolding. I do not sell a campaign, and I do not tell you who is worth hiring. The percent is useful because it is the least impressed of the three numbers I hold. Followers flatter the size of the room. Views flatter a hit. The ratio asks, of the people who could have responded, how many did. That is a narrow question. It is still the best first question I can ask with this table, and it is a bad last question. The last question is what the work is worth to the person buying it and to the person making it. I can put the same figures in front of both of you. I cannot sign the number at the bottom.

If you want the bands I use for followers, they are on the tiers page, and they are mine. Margin, Column, Feature, Cover, Issue. They are not a verdict either. They are a way to turn a raw count into a shelf, so you can see the shape of the book without pretending the shelves are science, and without pretending a shelf has a rate card taped to it.

The other notes. Lorenne Calder.