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The Death of the Click (axios.com)
Sara Fischer, writing for Axios: For the past 10 years, we've operated on the premise that the most important digital metric is the click that refers a person to a website. That click usually comes from a social distribution channel, like Facebook or Twitter, or a search engine, like Google or Bing. But according to industry experts, the click referral is becoming an idea of the past, soon to be replaced by content exposure. [...] Most publishers have designed their websites to measure user interaction through clicks, not scroll rates or time spent on stories. As the industry moves away from click-through rates (CTR's) as the most meaningful marketing metric, those publishers will have a difficult time justifying the effectiveness of their platforms for marketers.
Perhaps it is marketing itself that is no longer effective. Everyone knows the dominant players in every major market and everyone intuitively understands they're just being sold to. Some tune them out and the others are just fed up with invasive, annoying ads and use adblockers.
The Death of the Clickbait, that's what this story is.
Time spent on a page or how deeply I scroll down an article is no indication of how likely that corporation is to separate me from some of my money.
I think the advertisers would disagree with you on that. A big goal of advertising is simple brand-recognition. The longer they can keep their brand in front of your eyes, the better. I believe that they believe this works.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Except past a certain point, it becomes over exposure to the point of the brain just filtering out the brand advertisement as noise. The target then is never even consciously aware that the brand even had an ad there to begin with.
If they try to bypass this with things like audio or flashy graphics, then it crosses the threshold into annoyance status. In which case the target is irritated by the brand, and actively or passively avoid it. (Actively by muting the audio, or moving their eyes away from the ad. Passively by choosing a competitor when the brand name comes up later. A.k.a. A choice between /cola type 1/ one fast food joint and /cola type 2/ at another, neither is being promoted directly, but the irritated target may subconsciously choose the fast food joint that has the competitor just because they want to avoid the brand that irritated them.)
There is such a thing as over-advertising a brand, and yes it has negative consequences if you do so.
Clicks are often bogus thanks to incompetent web designers who don't pre-allocate real estate, thus causing pages - and clickpoints - to bounce up and down madly as content arrives. And, incidentally, making it harder to read the primary content.
A few times I had to turn off my ad blocking and script blocking, I was shocked at just how awful most people have it. Got to the site, started loading, saw what I wanted, then BOOM! it disappears! Scroll around to find it again, and its like playing cat and mouse. So unless I really really really need it, screw it.
The present day web has become unusable without some serious blocking.
Auto-playing audio/video metrics are even worse. I'll often close a page immediately if something starts making unsolicited noises and in many cases will never return to the site again, much less the article in question. But chances are that the offending content has already logged as "seen" thanks to buffering. I didn't see, if, I fled from it, and the fact that it was delivered to me unwanted doesn't make me a biuyer.
Exactly. Newsletter popups, that metric you described, all bad, all either ignored, or telling me which product I will avoid. And I have no doubt that the ad industry lies to their customers, giving them a false idea of how many people are seeing or bypassing the ads.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.