The Long and the Short of Media

Poynter is out with their latest Eye Tracking study. In a nutshell, they track how people interact with news in different formats. They found that people read farther into into online stories (77%) more than they do when perusing print (roughly 60%).

The findings are surprising. Further, it gets me thinking about the ramifications on PR. If a client appears at the bottom of say an AP news story that runs online, it's actually more valuable than the same story that runs print. Think about that.

Comments

[Mythophile]

I've been saying this for some time. This is why the web will never be TV like. Internet users are active not passive like a TV audience. In previous ages everyone had info handpicked, brought to them, and just consumed it. That's changing. Because the web requires you to seek info (rather than dropping it in your lap), you're much more involved with it and less tolerant of distractions.

Jacob Neilson is dead right about users and their brutal quest for content. Flash, PDFs and other things that slow the acquisition of information just PO users. Users are there for the content. If they weren't Firefox's adblock and flashblock wouldn't be so popular. They cut out distractions so that users can get to their content. If users were really fickle about their content, these things wouldn't bother them so much.

Keep in mind the internet is the introvert's dream world. Introverts are not a traditional sales audience. In fact, they're a sales team's worst nightmare because they only want facts and then want to be left alone. Their tolerance for fluff of any kind is very low.

[Mythophile]

Minor correction: Jacob Nielsen.

(Need edit button)

[Mike]

So Web users read deeper into stories that print readers, but do they have any analysis of what stories readers choose and how/why? I would imagine there's an effect of online readers only reading stories that really interest them or catch their eye - thus the deeper read. Print readers, on the hand, I assume are likely to go "broad rather than deep" and do a lot of scanning and half-reading. Not necessarily a bad thing, though.