Chartbeat Gets Certified to Measure Attention, Tries to Move Advertising Away From Clicks and Pageviews
Measuring actual attention - an interesting new approach.
Unlike pageviews, which simply measure whether a page has loaded, or even unique visitors — which some media companies argue are closer to being like physical readers of a newspaper or magazine — attention metrics like “active exposure time,” which Chartbeat tracks, can determine how much time a reader spent with a specific piece of content, by measuring whether they were actually looking at the page.
Chartbeat looks at a variety of factors, Haile said, including what portion of the page is within the viewing window (so it can tell you how far down someone got in the article or piece of content). But the crucial one is to sense whether someone is actually looking at the page, and it does this by tracking movement or interaction — based on the fact the average user touches the mouse or keyboard at least once every 4.8 seconds.