Media Metrics
Chartbeat is a company that analyzes web statistics to help content generators maximize revenue. Its CEO, Tony Haile, wrote an article explaining how some of the standard metrics used by most companies don't convey anything at all. Conventional wisdom says the number of times a page is visited indicates popularity. This is wrong, says Haile, since on the web we go “click, click, click”. It is a myth that “we read what we’ve clicked on” when in reality, “a stunning 55% spent fewer than 15 seconds actively on a page”! The next myth that Haile dispels is the value ad companies pay to sharing articles via Facebook or Twitter. This actually sounds logical: when someone shares an article, the feeling is that he “has not only read the content but is actively recommending it to other people”. Except it turns out that “there were only one tweet and eight Facebook likes for every 100 visitors”. Worse, “there is no relationship whatsoever between the amount a piece of content is sh...