From Nieman Lab:
From skimming and scanning to (the ultimate) reading, a new paper by Nir Grinberg looks at the ways we read online and introduces a novel measure for predicting how long readers will stick with an article.
Grinberg, a research fellow at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science jointly with the Northeastern’s Lazer Lab, looked at Chartbeat data for seven different publishers’ sites — a dataset of more than 7.7 million pageviews, on both mobile and desktop, of 66,821 news articles from the sites.
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Chartbeat, Grinberg said, already offers publishers pretty good tracking. “It’s one of the few companies that track what happens with a user afterthey click on a news article,” he told me. “Still, the actual measures it provides are kind of raw. It’ll tell you how much time a person has spent on a page, how far down the page they got, even something called ‘engaged time,’ which is the number of page interactions — mouse clicks, cursor movement, etc. But all of these are not particularly tailored to news; they could work on any web page.”
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“Instead of just how far down the page a person got, I’m looking at what percentage of the article they actually covered,” he said. “How far did they go down the page, relative to the length of the article? If someone spent a lot of time on an article and the article is short, that’s a good signal. If they spent the same amount of time on a long article, that’s less good.”
Grinberg was able to identify five types of reading behaviors: “Scan,” “Read,” “Read (long),” “Idle,” and “Shallow” (plus bounce backs, in the case that someone gets to a page and almost immediately leaves). Not surprisingly, different kinds of news sites see different kinds of reading behavior. On the sports site, for instance, “we see there is a lot of scanning. I think what’s going on there is a lot of people go to sports sites in order to find a result, like the outcome of a game, and don’t read the full thing. Another example that stood out is the how-to site, where we see that there’s more idling — people read an article, idle for a little bit, then continue. From looking at the articles themselves, it looks as if people are following instructions on how to do something in the real world.”
Link to the rest at Nieman Lab
A big part of ‘engaged time’ is ‘distraction time’ – how quickly/often something else is trying to get you to pay attention to ‘it’.
Like a short article broken into many pages so the site can throw more ads at you. Or unbearable color/font settings that make you want to shield your eyes from them.
Only then do we get to the question of whether the title/headline made you look, or whether the article read like it wasn’t from a bot or a five-year-old, and if it could hold your attention.