The most common myths about online media have collapsed like a house of cards

Often we face different statements about online media, which are obviously not true, but it is still hard to convince the interlocutor. Fortunately, there is a competent person with years of experience, who deserves to be called an expert in the field of media analysis that has refuted a number of erroneous statements. So today, I would like to serve as a mouthpiece for Tony Haile (Tony Haile - CEO of analyst firm Chartbeat, which works with data provided by more than 4,000 publishing houses and the media) and to refute a number of common misconceptions: Myth 1: Pageviews, i.e. the number of pages vied is absolutely accurate and indicative measure. There is hardly a person who has not heard the statement: “This news portal is very popular because its pages often viewed, therefore, a lot of people read it.” 55% of visitors spend on the site pages less than 15 seconds, - said Tony Haile, - so you should not pay attention to how many people have read the article “X” but how much time they have devoted to this! Myth 2: The flashy and eye-catching headline is the key to success. It is considered that the article headline is to attract attention and be screaming. However, after analyzing 580,000 articles in the US media, Chartbeat employees found that the article headlines with such words as “Top”, “Best”, “Nude”, “Biggest”, “Positions” and others in the same style, turned out to be the ones that have caused the greatest number of clicks, but have been read the least amount of time. In contrast to these articles, the latest news, which featured the words “Obama”, “Snowden” and “Syria”, have been read for the longest time. Myth 3: It does not matter for how long articles have been read. The most important thing is still the number of clicks. Evidence suggests that if the article has detained the reader's attention for more than three minutes, there is twice as high probability that he would again visit this Website, than if he had read an article for just a minute. “That is why the editors, who believe only pageviews, ignoring how much time was spent to read an article, automatically lose game because they do not have an objective idea of what topics are really popular among the readers”, - says head of Chartbeat. Myth 4: If people share articles on social networks, it means they have read it and liked it. It is considered that the more “likes” the news get and shared in social networks, the more people have actually read it and appreciated. In practice, however, 10,000 likes and posts were analyzed and it was revealed that the article, which the most number of people have actually read, got less than 100 ”likes” and less than 50 tweets. At the same time five times less people, compared with the first have actually read an article that was often shared and marked as the favorite. Myth 5 (my favorite): It is better to pay for an advertising article, writing a frank ode to one’s own enterprise / product and to be definitely published on the news portal, than to prepare a press release. In fact, only one-third of the readers read the advertising content for more than 15 seconds, and do not think that even if your article is not marked as advertising, the reader will not notice a frank desire to sell him something. However, only 24% scroll down the article page. At the same time, 71% of page visitors scroll the common news to the end (which may be an issued press release), and two-thirds spend for it more than 15 seconds. Complains about “yellow” content of news articles are often heard in response that such is the demand. However, I want to believe that the experience of our American colleagues is applicable for the Latvian reality and, thus, do not think about ordinary readers worse than they really are. Intelligent content is still in demand; a question for analysts is only in how they measure the popularity of articles and news portal as a whole. Read more about the research here.