(Limor Peer)

It's symptomatic of the newspaper industry's trouble defining itself, that it is unsure how to measure its audience.

The last few of weeks saw conflicting interpretations of whether time spent with newspaper Web sites has actually gone up or down. A Nielsen study showing that the average time spent on newspaper sites dipped in the first quarter of 2008 compared to the same time period last year, received the following headline on the Editor & Publisher's site: "Only 11 top newspaper sites report increase in time spent." Carl Bialik, the WSJ's Numbers Guy, putting newspapers sites' statistics in context of overall Web usage patterns, also concluded that "newspapers' online performance looks less impressive" when considered against the backdrop of "a sharp increase in the amount of time American adults spent on the Web." But others suggest that these findings should bring relief to online newspaper publishers because some are doing well (see CMSwire).

But, is "time spent" measuring the right thing? Many think not.

When Nielsen announced in the summer of 2007 that it is replacing "page views" with "time spent," the announcement was received with some fanfare. Some called it "the best engagement metric," and many were happy to see the page views metric fall from grace.

Among the touted benefits of measuring how many minutes a user spends on a site is that it allows comparison between two or more different sites: "It is not that page views are irrelevant now, but they are a less accurate gauge of total site traffic and engagement," Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen/NetRatings said. "Total minutes is the most accurate gauge to compare between two sites."

Others point to "time spent" as a more fair measurement of "Web environments that have never been well-served by the page view, such as online gaming and Internet applications." For example, Ross said, "MySpace may have 10 to 11 times more page views than YouTube, but myspace.com users spend only three times more minutes on the site... Therefore, measuring total time spent on a site will make it easier for advertisers to mold their ads to how users are actually accessing content."

And, by measuring time and not pages, you bypass the problem of sites that artificially inflate page views by increasing the number of pages a user has to go click on.

But many others were not convinced this is, or should be, the way to measure Web traffic. The obvious argument is that "time spent" is deficient because it does not directly measure whether anyone is actually paying attention. Bryan Eisenberg, an author and expert on online marketing and marketing analytics said "anybody who browses with several open tabs, or walked away from their computer knows how big a mistake it would be to assume that, just because the website is open, someone is actually paying attention."

So, while measurable, this sort of "time spent" is not very useful to advertisers - a key stakeholder in the conversation about metrics. On OJR, Robert Niles points out that "ultimately, a publisher ought to be able to show not only that it is delivering readers to an advertiser, but that it is positing the ad in a way that readers will see it... 'Time spent on the website' doesn't deliver that assurance."

The Newspaper Association of America, recognizing some of these problems, has made an effort to highlight the issue. The Audience Development Committee for NAA's new Media Federation offers a resource guide to various measures and their limitations.

But a more fundamental issue is: Are newspaper Web sites well served by the "time spent" metric for their online audience? Is that what they should be measuring? Some think not.

In our work at the Media Management Center, we have argued for a more sophisticated and nuanced approach to measurement - the focus should be on the role a site fulfills is a person's life. We see online behavior (i.e., usage - which we measure as a combination of both time and frequency) as a function of how a person engages with the site, and argue that both should be measured and addressed by news organizations.

Also focusing on engagement, Robert Gorell - writing in grokdotcom back in July 2007 - thinks that both page views and time spent are simply proxies for frequency and reach. This is old thinking that is inappropriate for digital media. Engagement, he says, is what we should measure.

Gerry McGovern, writing in CMSwire, thinks any measure of quantity relating to the audience produces meaningless information. He gives two examples:

Example: A customer clicks on page A, then leaves after 1 minute. What does that mean? If they stayed for 3 minutes would that have been better? Why? Supposing the person who spends 3 minutes on the page finds it cluttered and full of verbiage?

Example: A customer clicks on page C, then clicks on page M, then goes back to page C, then leaves. What does that mean? Did they think they were going to get something on page M that they didn't get? Or did they get what they needed on page M, and were simply using the Back button to navigate out of the site?

He proposes using a qualitative measure of how successful a Web site is - identifying the top three tasks of a Web site, giving people these tasks, and then measuring whether they were able to complete them. "The essence of Web metrics... is the observation of our customers as they are hunched over their screens," he says. "Were they able to quickly do what they came to do? Web metrics can be boiled down to two words: task completion."

This resonates. In our recent work with teens and young adults we heard many times that they go to news sites to get the news. That's it. They're not interested in spending time on these sites doing anything else. If that's the case (and it seems to be - wait for our report in July), newspaper sites are at a disadvantage compared to many other sites when it comes to how much time people spend on them. Shouldn't these sites be measured in terms of how well they serve their audience? How quickly people can find what they're looking for? How well they lay out issues, or provide added value to the news of the day with digests, timelines, maps, data banks, etc.? Just because you can measure time spent - across media, which is nice - doesn't mean you should, or that you only rely on that measurement. Newspaper sites are in essence trying to compete in a race that is not their own, and risk handicapping themselves by letting others define them.

In the end, however, as Phil Napoli explains in Audience Economics, the way an audience is defined depends on whether it can be measured in a practical way that is acceptable to all stakeholders. Newspapers just need to have a clearer vision of what they do and make sure their stake is on the table.


By Limor Peer (l-peer@northwestern.edu)
Limor Peer is research director for the Media Management Center and Readership Institute.