Human Bandwidth and Audience Factsheet (KV)

I really enjoyed reading this paper by Zheng, Cyi, Kaufhold as it shows the multitude of ways of understanding audiences. I found it really interesting that people spent more time on average on weather sites than news sites and opinion sites. If you consider the vast amount of content on a news site versus a weather site, this is a pretty remarkable statistic. Put another way, the weather has literally one job, whereas the news sites are giving you loads of information, but the news websites are still not as sticky as the weather sites. I'm also not surprised weather sites won on loyalty, as people tend to check the weather on a daily basis or even sometimes multiple times a day. However, is loyalty the right word here? When I think of the word loyal, I think of something or someone I would do anything for, but in the case of the weather web sites, perhaps I'm going there b/c of habit on a daily basis.


After looking through the audience factsheet what stood out to me was that in the fine print, desktop data is made up of web browsing and video, and mobile is broken up in to websites and apps. When thinking about how much time people spend on these news sites, I don't simply want to know if people are using mobile or desktop, but I want to know what they are doing while they are there. Are they watching videos? reading stories? commenting? I think this data would give us a better sense of the multi dimensionality and bandwidth of the audience.