The user shared the article, but did they really read it?

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According to foreign media reports, founded in March 2012, headlines Web site Upworthy in just two years to develop into a huge flow of media sites, the site's Alexa global ranking of 317, while the U.S. region ranked 150. This almost inconceivable phenomenon has attracted the attention of many in the industry, and earlier this month, the "title Party" and "content party" in Facebook and Twitter launched a confrontational debate.

Let's start with a brief look at Upworthy, the site is dedicated to disseminating meaningful images and information, and they are deconstructing news from other sites to draw a fascinating title, and the new title must be a form of more click-through and forwarding, and the headlines will then be shared on social networks, Users will visit the Upworthy Master Station by clicking on the headlines, a way to spread news similar to the virus.

The huge flow of upworthy is inextricably linked to the spread of social networks and the sharing of netizens, and then there is a problem, for the links that netizens share, do they just read a headline and share them? or have you read the content? "According to our research, people who share things through social networks have no direct connection to what they actually read, and in short, sharing is not equal to reading," Chartbeat CEO Tony Heiler Tony Haile of the website's real-time traffic analysis agency. ”

If you're a media worker, or have your own blog, or a regular attention to the number of shares of an article, then Heller's statement will certainly make you surprised, after all, only when a person read the content after the fun or meaningful will think to share the relevant links, At the same time, the number of web articles sharing is also the main measure of its popularity, which is why large news organizations are equipped with at least one social media editor. So if someone tells you that a Web page has been read 1 million times without being shared, or shared 1 million times, but not read once, you will not believe it, and this is indeed Chartbeat's discovery.

Josh Schwartz, chief data scientist at Chartbeat, then clarified that in Heller's parlance, "social networks" are specifically Twitter, but that the fact that people are sharing without reading content is pervasive in social networks. "The number of times it is shared by Twitter is strongly correlated with traffic for an article," Mr. Schwartz said, "but the number of times the article was read and the number of times it was shared was not very relevant." ”

According to Schwartz's analysis, there may be four reasons for this: (1) People are using social networks on mobile devices, which are generally small screens, so people will rarely be able to read the content, and (2) what they share can reflect their reading preferences, Studies show that people are more likely to share content that makes them feel happy or nostalgic, so if a headline can impress him, it will naturally motivate him to share it; (3) For those major news events, one can only wait to share the headlines after they have seen them; (4) People are still not used to reading content over the Internet.

Whatever the reason, "sharing ≠ reading" has become ubiquitous in social networks. "For the reason of work, every day I browse through hundreds of articles, and I admit that I shared some of the articles without reading them," Taylor Lorenz, head of social media at the Daily Mail, "said Thelles Lorenz." I think if someone tells you that what he's sharing has been read by himself, Then he must be lying. ”

Upworthy also the user's clicks, reading depth and other indicators of statistical analysis, the results and chartbeat basically consistent. In general, when reading an article, the total number of people who read it in One-fourth is more than those who share the dots, share, and read the whole story. In addition, Upworthy also found an interesting phenomenon, people read the article One-fourth, the sharing behavior of a peak, while reading the full article, there will be a more obvious share peak. The social news aggregation website BuzzFeed also found that when people use a computer to browse a Web page, they share the page 3.5 minutes after it is opened, while the data is two minutes when using a mobile phone to browse the Web.

So when you see your friend sharing a link to an article, it's quite possible that he doesn't really read it. In addition, it is unscientific to measure the quality of an article by sharing quantity. Many of these media and advertisers have seen this, and many sites, including Upworthy and YouTube, have lowered their focus on the PV values of the pages and shifted their focus to the depth of their reading.

Upworthy, for example, has started tracking a user's new indicator, "Attention time (attention minutes)", which helps the site find out which pages or content is more appealing to users, and then collects different advertising costs based on this metric.

To sum up, "sharing ≠ reading" is a common phenomenon in today's social networks, although somewhat eccentric, but we should also try to adapt. In addition, although the number of shares in an article does not reflect its quality, it can at least reflect the title of the article as attractive.

Translator: Light Army

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