Measuring Audience Attention on Websites

Media organizations often emphasize how popular their websites are, as they attract many unique visitors. However, this is only part of the picture. As Zheng, Chyi & Kaufhold (2012) showed, audience attention on the web has different dimensions, including visibility (audience share), popularity (unique visitors), loyalty (visits per person), depth (pages per visit), and stickiness (time per page). Pew's fact sheet on the top 50 online news entities in 2015 allows us to examine two of the five dimensions: popularity and stickiness. According to the current ranking, these are the five websites that attracted the highest number of unique users: 1) Yahoo-ABC News Network, 2) CNN Network, 3) NBC News Digital, 4) Huffingtonpost.com, 5) CBS News. However, if we rank the 50 online news entities based on the average minutes per visit, these are the top five websites: 1) Fox News Digital Network, 2) NBC News Digital, 3 + 4) The New York Times Brand and CBS News, 5) Yahoo-ABC News Network. Two entities that appear on the second list are not included in the first list. While the number of visits per person is not mentioned in the fact sheet, Zheng et al. found that in June 2008 weather sites and news portals scored the highest on loyalty. Also, magazine sites performed well in terms of depth, as they received  a high number of page views within one visit. I am interested in examining the different dimensions of audience attention in different sections of a given website. For example, the sport section may attract more visitors, but users could spend more time in the news section, and the entertainment section would score the highest on loyalty. On other websites it may be different. I am also curious to see social networking sites' performance on the five dimensions of audience attention.