The measurements of time spent in reading around the social networks come to show that the “attachment” users have with the readable content barely exceeds a few minutes, a period too short to feel fully informed of a reality.
A recent research by Charbeat, an enterprise that tracks real-time web traffic, assure that “half of the visitors who click on an article would barely read what catches their first glance” and that 45 percent of those same readers also “spend less than 15 seconds on the page” they just accessed.
Hence this behaviour, the greatest efforts from the digital news are focused on finding alternatives that allow readers to spend more time reading and to make them return to other contents in the same web page or its homepage, so they consolidate their loyalty to the site.
That is why, with more frequently and systematicity, these news are appealing the usage of videos and animated graphics, making the readers dedicate more time to those “visual news” than the textual ones, especially if they transmit live events in which images can say more than words.
This form of resource “attaches” with more intensity than the rest, as long as the context of reality favors it. It does not necessarily means that everything merits video support, though. There’s news that are better received when read, to better assimilate the message or the data it provides.
In addition, Charbeat’s measurements have demonstrated that even in the case of videos, there are average view times, meaning that they carry higher and lower audiences depending on the subject covered. So, this “attachment” varies.
There has been proof of this in many news’ events that have taken place in our country and which have magnificently captured the attention of the public. But as in the case of texts, users of both formats are still passing travelers.
The enormous volume of informative text, video and image in the internet does not allow a user to have the time nor the stomach to swallow and digest so much information, because the dynamics of those platforms would be lost, which indicates that in many cases what they ingest is not enough to understand and discern the reality that’s being faced.
If those users are unlucky enough to the point where these networks will often offer them upfront fake news or at least those news would have certain features that make them suspiciously uncertain and not credible, then they’re just rendered as some intoxication for the trusthworthy news, that was created by the virtual world, not the reality itself.
In the effort to prevent these harmful elements from causing a greater discredit to the digital news wide campus, large technology companies and content & application providers are creating the corresponding antidotes to identify those fake news, tricky or plagiarized pictures, insulting content and account & entity impersonation.
Although, the biggest challenge should be deciphering the formula to make those who enter these sub-pages and homepages of the digital news sites, not leave as fast to not call them “passing readers”, making them more of a loyal reading group of people.
That’s the indisputable advantage that printed newspapers have, it’s difficult for the digital counterpart to replace or lessen them.
– Translated from Spanish by Randy Rodriguez.
Director's Thoughts 