E&P Article on Time Spent
In August, Editor & Publisher reached out to me (via our online editor) to talk about online metrics. Today the article published. It’s well-written, takes both sides of “is it meaningful?” pretty well, yet still needs a tiny bit of clarity from my side.
Here’s my small part:
Jason Silverstein, director of the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer’s interactive division, says time spent is a metric that definitely warrants attention. Silverstein, who joined the newspaper from Yahoo last year, contends that page views can indicate a thousand different things. A Web site can put up a slide show with a 100 slides and 10 people can breeze through all of them, producing 1,000 page views alone — but just what does that signal?
Silverstein, who just led a redesign of CharlotteObserver.com, believes in breaking content into “easily digestible” pieces so people can stay and consume, and keep coming back. Sometimes all the bells and whistles — even slide shows — try to do too much, he says. Keeping it simple helps. “It’s not about one 10- minute chunk,” he adds. “It’s about two five-minute chunks.”
The main part that’s misses from my quote is we were talking about video timing — moving pictures do needs to be short and sweet. For reference, I also compared 1,000 page-views on a story to 100 images getting 10 views, and how page-views don’t provide context of user interaction… but I think/hope that’s inferred.
Finally, I wanted to point out the other metrics — some of which we talked about, like repeat visitors – warrant attention and are pretty well covered in the article. It’s worth a read if you’re a publisher.