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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.
What you're looking for is "Cost Per Impression" (CPI):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_per_impression
It's been around at least as long as newspapers.
The Death of the Clickbait, that's what this story is.
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.
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.