Mark Zohar, President and CEO of Viafoura, shares why he believes that Frequency (the F in RFV) is the most important metric to be tracking in an era where content is increasingly a commodity that AI can summarize, paraphrase, and serve without ever sending a click your way.
The publishing industry has spent the better part of two decades chasing the wrong metrics.
Publishers chased reach when scale was the story. They chased pageviews when programmatic told us impressions were currency. And now, in an AI era where Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and a growing constellation of answer engines are intercepting traffic before it ever reaches a publisher’s domain, the old playbook isn’t just tired. It’s broken.
So here’s the question every publisher CEO, CRO, and audience leader should be asking right now:
What the F are you doing?
The “F” in RFV is the metric that survives the AI era
RFV (Recency, Frequency, Volume) has been a customer-analytics staple for decades. Recency tells you when someone last showed up. Volume tells you how much content they consumed while they were there. But of those three letters, Frequency is the one that quietly does the heavy lifting. Frequency tells you whether you have a business.
Frequency is the metric that tracks habit formation. It’s the metric that signals brand loyalty. It’s the leading indicator of customer lifetime value, registration propensity, and subscription conversion. And in an environment where AI is steadily eroding the casual, search-driven, one-and-done visit, Frequency is the only metric that compounds in your favor.
If a reader visits you once a month because Google sent them, you don’t have a reader. You have a rounding error.
If that same reader visits you twelve times a month because they want to be there, to weigh in, to read what others are saying, to participate in a live conversation with your journalists, to follow a topic they care about, then you have a customer. You have ad inventory that actually performs. You have a registration waiting to happen. You have a subscriber in the making.
