What You Think You Know About the Web Is Wrong

Tony Haile, the CEO of Chartbeat, published an article at Time on March  9, 2014 to talked about the myths of use clickthrough as the measure of ad performance on the web. He mentioned that 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. Sites like the New York Times are redesigning themselves in ways that place less emphasis on the all-powerful click. Native advertising, advertising designed to hold your attention rather than simply gain an impression, is growing at an incredible pace. 

He pointed out 4 myths that we’ve taken for granted just aren’t true:

Myth 1: We read what we’ve clicked on
In fact, most people who click don't read. The media world is currently in a frenzy about click fraud, they should be even more worried about the large percentage of the audience who aren’t reading what they think they’re reading.The most valuable audience is the one that comes back.Those linkbait writers are having to start from scratch every day trying to find new ways to trick clicks from hicks with the ‘Top Richest Fictional Public Companies’. Those writers living in the Attention Web are creating real stories and building an audience that comes back.

Myth 2: The more we share the more we read
People who share content are a small fraction of the people who visit that content. Measuring social sharing is great for understanding social sharing, but if you’re using that to understand which content is capturing more of someone’s attention, you’re going beyond the data. Social is not the silver bullet of the Attention Web.

Myth 3: Native advertising is the savior of publishing
On a typical article two-thirds of people exhibit more than 15 seconds of engagement, on native ad content that plummets to around one-third. On the native ad content, only 24% of visitors scrolled down the page at all, compared with 71% for normal content. If they do stick around and scroll down the page, fewer than one-third of those people will read beyond the first one-third of the article. Driving traffic to content that no one is reading is a waste of time and money. As more and more brands start to care about what happens after the click, there’s hope that native advertising can reach a level of quality that doesn’t require tricks or dissimulation; in fact, to survive it will have to.

Myth 4: Banner ads don’t work
A key factor is the amount of time a visitor spend actively looking at the page when the ad is in view. Someone looking at the page for 20 seconds while an ad is there is 20-30% more likely to recall that ad afterwards. You have to create great creative and then get it in front of a person’s face for a long enough period for them to truly see it. The challenge for banner ads is that traditional advertising heuristics about what works have been placing ads on the parts of the page that capture the least attention, not the most.

Valuing ads not simply on clicks but on the time and attention they accrue might just be the lifeline they’ve been looking for. Time is a rare scarce resource on the web and we spend more of our time with good content than with bad. Valuing advertising on time and attention means that publishers of great content can charge more for their ads than those who create link bait. This move to the Attention Web may sound like a collection of small signals and changes, but it has the potential to transform the web.That’s something worth paying attention to.

http://time.com/12933/what-you-think-you-know-about-the-web-is-wrong/