In fact, a stunning 55% spent fewer than 15 seconds actively on a page. Chartbeat looked at deep user behavior across 2 billion visits across the web over the course of a month and found that most people who click don’t read. The more pageviews a site gets, the more people are reading, the more successful the site. The data these methods capture provide a new window into behavior on the web and suggests that much of the facts we’ve taken for granted just ain’t true.įor 20 years, publishers have been chasing pageviews, the metric that counts the number of times people load a web page. If the click is the turnstile outside a stadium, these new methods are the TV control room with access to a thousand different angles. Welcome to the Attention Web.Īt the core of the Attention Web are powerful new methods of capturing data that can give media sites and advertisers a second-by-second, pixel-by-pixel view of user behavior. It’s no longer just your clicks they want, it’s your time and attention. Native advertising, advertising designed to hold your attention rather than simply gain an impression, is growing at an incredible pace. New upstarts like Medium and Upworthy are eschewing pageviews and clicks in favor of developing their own attention-focused metrics. Sites like the New York Times are redesigning themselves in ways that place less emphasis on the all-powerful click. Spurred by new technology and plummeting click-through rates, what happens between the clicks is becoming increasingly important and the media world is scrambling to adapt. But something is happening to the click web. In 20 years, everything else about the web has been transformed, but the click remains unchanged, we live on the click web. Where TV asked for your undivided attention, the web didn’t care as long as you went click, click, click. It flooded the web with spam, linkbait, painful design and tricks that treated users like lab rats.

However, the click had some unfortunate side effects. The click’s natural dominance built huge companies like Google and promised a whole new world for advertising where ads could be directly tied to consumer action. From that moment on, the click became the defining action of advertising on the web. Here’s where we started to go wrong: In 1994, a former direct mail marketer called Ken McCarthy came up with the clickthrough as the measure of ad performance on the web.

Come a little closer than you see