- Why do commercial websites often serve 3 ads on their homepage?
- This is their main platform on which to sell themselves to the users who visit our websites.
- Imagine a line up of website homepages on a newsstand. Which one would be the most popular? I would say the one that looks the best and shows off to a potential user as wide a range of content as is possible. How well would a magazine sell if 1/2 of the cover was taken up by an advert for a Vauxhall Corsa?
- In the same way in which The London Paper do a “cover takeover” websites could offer a homepage TO at a massive premium and at other times look to increase the amount of people getting to content with which they can actively engage and creating a more meaningful expedience for users and advertisers.
Ads should be tracked using time spent actively engaging them, not amount of times viewed. The time somebody views something and takes an entire message means more than seeing the start of a message twice as many times.
What is Active Engagement Time? (AET) – You heard it here first!
- AET is how long a user spends viewing, reading, listening to and watching content. It does not count the time spent moving between content and waiting for it to load.
- AET is something I think will become increasingly important to web publishing companies and will increase if the function of a website is to provide to the user.
- The longer we can make a users AET with a product and the more users we can get the better our products will become.
- AET is a two way process between the user and the content provider.
ABCe reports currently state the amount of unique users and page impressions. I predict this will change to unique users and AET or an equivalent.
We should do one thing to become dominant in online publishing. Actively engage users.
