Increasing 'Time Spent' and site revenue with Particls

A post on slashdot covers the Buzzmetrics/Neilson news that:

"...news that one of the largest Net measurement companies, Nielsen/NetRatings, is about to abandon page views as its primary metric for comparing sites. Instead the
company will use total time spent on a site. The article notes, "This is likely to affect Google's ranking because while users visit the site often, they don't usually spend much time there."

Pageviews have been barely useful for quite some time now. As a result, many (including myself with a proposal for AttentStreams and AudientStreams) have called for a change in standard measurements. Compete.com has even moved to their definition of 'Attention'.

While Time Spent is a little more useful, it is not perfect. For example it does not factor out people who leave pages open in tabs and does not indicate a level of actual interactivity with the page/content/service.

Interestingly though, Particls (the application not the website) has an enormous time-spent value. We average more than 7 hours per user per day of time spent because the application is designed to persist in front of users all day (in the form of a news ticker - and soon - some other interesting presentation styles).

As a result, our publisher partners who distribute white label versions of Particls are experiencing huge jumps in their overall time-spent engaged with their brand, content and advertising.

Learn more about the white label partner program here: www.particls.com/intouch

Attention Metrics and the Enterprise

Tim Bull takes up my post about Audient, Attent and Life Streams and asks how it can be applied to the Enterprise (Tim himself is responsible for adopting cutting edge stuff for his major enterprise employer).

He writes:

"I'm going to add to the call-to-arms from the Enterprise point of view. The ability to understand not just what people click on, but the attention they give to elements of the new, rich media world is crucial. Detailed information that goes beyond "IP Address loaded page X" and various derivatives of this is crucial."

He goes on to write:

"...I think we DO need a standard for aggregating attention data from all the different clients people use during a day, for the very simple reason that in Enterprises understanding what people are using and how they are using it is a crucial part of the delivery eco-system for information. It's the feedback loop that lets you know you're getting it right.

It may be useful for bloggers etc. as well, but I think the problem should be focused on the Enterprise as this is where the "real" need is (I show my bias here, but I don't believe I as a blogger need to know in great detail who looks at what, but as an Enterprise of 160,000 people globally I do need to understand where and how my information is flowing)."

I commented on Tim's post about Enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and philosophies. I will re-phrase and expand it here...

I agree that Enterprises would greatly benefit from the sort of tools and philosophies that are happening out here on the edge. The marketplace, however, does not make it friendly for startups to target the enterprise.

Most enterprises are wary of change. Even when they are open to trying new things, most (rightly) require many more features to make the solution work in an enterprise environment - which can be a cost that startups can't absorb straight out of the gate.

Even if a startup is willing to tackle these barriers, however, they have to invest in sales and support teams to generate adoption. After all that, most enterprises don't trust small startups and just wait for the big vendors to come with similar offerings.

Attensa and Newsgator are doing a great job fighting to create adoption in Enterprise 2.0 - but they are, by the nature of their target market, forced to be conservative in their implementations and focus on a lot of plumbing and command and control issues that bog down investment in innovation for end-users.

All that being said, however, it is clear that consumer technologies are quickly being adopted by enterprises because those technologies are usually more end-user focused.

There was nothing worse than the old CRM and ERP systems that ended up causing a lot of headaches for end-users because they focused on enterprise objectives rather than making someone's day better.

By breeding technologies in the consumer market and then adapting them to the enterprise, the result is much more user-friendly. They have to be. Because end-users don't have management telling them they have to use the given tool. In the end, enterprises are forced to adapt to the most popular tools. They are still working on getting IM support right.

Getting back to the original subject, however. I agree with Tim that forging an open standard for Audient and Attent Streams can have profound impacts for both the media and for business. It could be based on Attention.XML but it would need to encapsulate far more information than just clickstreams and form data.

Life after pageviews: Proposing AudientStream and AttentStream

There is an ongoing discussion about the usefulness of the pageview. Scoble has once again raised the issue as well.

I'd like to make a proposal. Why can't the tools themselves - embedded players, browsers, second life clients, readers etc report back deep Attention/Engagement metrics?

First, some background...

A Lifestream
A LifeStream is an established concept and has been talked about by a number of people including Emily Chang, Stowe Boyd and others. It is an outgoing channel/record of everything you do/produce aggregated into a single feed.

Consider though, that this is actually a stream of your Attention Data. Data that represents what you have paid Attention to in the past. Some call it an Attention Stream.


In keeping with this theme, I would like to propose 2 additional concepts.

AudientStream
An AudientStream (An Audient is defined as someone who pays Attention to another) is a channel/record of everything you might need to pay Attention to in the future.

A simple example of an AudientStream might be all the RSS feeds in your OPML file aggregated together.

A more sophisticated example would be an aggregated feed of your OPML file ranked against your APML file (using something like Particls).

Unlike a Lifestream, it is a list of things you are YET to see.

Unlike just you OPML file, it might include Twitter items, email, etc.



AttentStream
This is where I think we can make an impact on the Pageviews and metrics problem.

An AttentStream (An Attent is defined as someone who receives Attention from another) is a channel/record of others paying Attention to you. This would be a stream of events (preferably attributed to people) that signify Attention given to you by another.

The AttentStream would come from the tools that people use to pay attention. Browsers, Readers, Embedded Players, the Flash Player, Adobe Reader, the SecondLife Client etc, etc. Because the tool itself does the reporting it can report more subtle information that can't be gathered on the server. Think of it like distributed analytics.

An example of an AttentStream might be if the YouTube player reported each time a video was played - how much of the video was played and by which user. This way authors can get Attention information about content they were involved in producing.

The information would not just include page impressions or views. It would include richer things like time spent, partial views etc.

Each tool might produce an RSS feed that can be aggregated together by existing or new metrics companies like Compete, Buzzlogic and Feedburner.


With an AttentStream one could do basic things like displaying the identity of your subscribers (those that grant permission) much like Twitter shows your followers.

It could also do more advanced things like going beyond the pageview to give you more information about who is spending time on your content with or without a click.

I would volunteer Particls to testbed this type of system for publishers. If the community likes the idea and we come up with a concrete implementation we will be the first to provide reports to publishers about the amount of visibility their content has received from our users who opt into providing that information.

This does not just mean just click throughs (which can already be measured with Analytics packages and Feedburner) but rather more subtle gestures like 'time spent' viewing the content via a popup alert or on the ticker. These are more subtle, yet equally important forms of Attention giving and engagement.

Join the conversation
This is just the beginning of an idea. Join the conversation and suggest some concrete implementations. Drop me a line if you are interested in helping out or join us on Tangler for real-time chat.

Update
Elias has written a follow up discussing the motivations behind collecting this sort of data. I have also responded in his comments to further clarify my thoughts.

Attention Metric

Our friends over at Compete.com (fellow APML Workgroup members) have launched a new metric called 'Attention'

While I am not sure I 100% agree with the way they calculate it, it is yet another example of the value of Attention in the new media landscape.