Time Spent

That audience-measuring company Chartbeat has “gained accreditation from the Media Rating Council for attention-based measurement of both content and advertising” is important to advertisers and therefore to all the people whose work and internet time-wasting activities depend on them. This metric, the apparent next metric, after page views and “uniques,” is perhaps harder to trick but still easy to optimize for, especially if you’re one of the new formless internet publishers — a relatively straightforward video, a quiz, or some as-of-yet unknown demanding media object that can hold you still, if not keep you truly engaged, will, in time terms, usually beat out a written story that takes a long time to produce and read. People are already hashing this part out.

What they’re not yet hashing out what this means for another type of company: The read-later apps. So let’s start: Instapaper, Pocket, Readability, Longform — the apps that take links and make them into clean little ad-free phone pamphlets that you can read on a plane — have been criticized, celebrated, but mostly tolerated. They help people read your work, which is encouraging; they also, at some point in the copy/clean process, at least give you a click, which is what you, or your editor, or your publisher, ultimately needs. Now, imagine a world in which “attention minutes” or some such measurement is how your employers measure the success of your work — a world in which its measurable value is connected to the time people spend with it. In that world, read-later apps, as they function now — giving you a click, but siphoning all of your time — are theft. Well?