Slashdot Mirror
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.
The linked article is almost as long as the /. post above. I'd vote down the story as "not the best" Seriously -- several build up paragraphs of text with a final conclusion of "passive scrolling" followed by a button "show less" --- this article can't be much less. it needs a "show more"
Suggests to me it is click spam that made it though /. filters. SEO bait.
While these new metrics might make more sense than measuring clickthroughs, I still don't see how this will achieve the objective. 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 TV has been advancing toward this point for a long time, but the Internet is overtaking it quickly -
The core problem is that there's just way too much low quality content out there. There's an avalanche of TV channels, websites, blogs, zines, etc - a mountain of content for every eyeball walking the earth and more. But 99.99% of the content is nothing that anyone would actually pay money for.
Clickthroughs allowed temporarily the parasitic existence of clickbait sites and fake news sites ad infinitum.
But we are getting to the point where people realize that there are about 5 TV channels they ever really want to watch, and about 5 websites they would care if they had to live without, and even fewer that they want to pay for.
The problem is not the metrics. You're going to get what you measure.
The problem is really that nobody is making anything that the general public thinks is worth paying for.
I attended a conference almost a decade ago with a workshop titled "How Idiots Track Success". The idea that clicks were valuable is an invention of the advertising industry. Like almost everything else in the advertising industry, it is a commonly believed cliche based on plying a large thread of self-serving misinformation with a very thin thread of truth. The reason it continues to be used is that honest measures make it obvious that online advertising is not really all that valuable. That serves almost nobody.
Indirect metrics follow the same cycle for decades. If it isn't the advertiser's actual BOTTOM line -- and it never is -- then the metric is indirect. And indirect metrics simply follow the very basic fad system: if it's common to see big numbers, the new way shows small numbers, and vice versa.
Views - 1 per viewing of an ad
Viewers - 1 per person per ad
Eyeballs - 2 per person per ad
Hits - 1 per object on the page
Pageviews - 1 per page
Impression Time - seconds per page read
Clicks - 1 per click of an ad
Click through rate - clicks per minute, per day, per month, per year, per thousand impressions
Conversions - per interaction
Walk-ins - warm lead
Buyer - actual money, top line
Profitable buyer - actual money, bottom line
The game is always to market your number as smaller, and hence more accurate and more meaningful than others, or to make people prefer your numbers because they are proportionately higher than other metrics. Big whoop.
My favourite example has got to be the groupon model. We'll bring more paying customers into your business. Good. They'll pay so much less that you'll actually lose money, but you'll have a new customer! Yeah, one who will never pay full price for anything, and will hop around from one loss-leader discount to another. Who makes money off of these customers? Oh yeah, groupon does, and no one else.
Let's do it again.
100 customers spend 100 seconds reading 90% of your article! No they didn't. They scrolled to it, took a phone call for a minute, and left it open. And they didn't understand what they read, so it really doesn't matter. And then, they didn't buy anything. Watch me care.