Time spent on a site or a visit ranks right up there with total page views and monthly unique visitors as widely quoted metrics masking as indicators of success for news organizations.
No, it's not a crime to misuse a metric, but isn't a shame to waste your time on something that's not absolutely essential to your site's success?
Plus, the way that time spent is calculated is flawed. All web metrics are flawed somewhat, but time spent is really misleading.
More on the ugly methodology later – let's tackle time spent's uselessness first. In other words, if the methodology were acceptable would time spent still be a key performance indicator?
Advertisers have always made decisions based on the level of engagement a news org's audiences have with its brand and content. But both content and the ways people use and interact with content are different – and thus the way engagement is measured is different, too.
In the past, time spent was an important measure of engagement for news orgs and advertisers. People spent whole chunks of time with one medium or another. Readership surveys measured time spent per day or per week.
Because these were surveys, time spent was based on self-reported information. It was what people said they did vs. what they actually did.
But it didn't matter whether what people said matched with what they did. What mattered was how engaged people felt. People who reported they spent an hour a day with Monday's newspaper but actually only spent twenty minutes believed they spent a large chunk of time and attention with a news org.
In stark contrast, web advertising decisions depend on knowing actual behavior as reported via rows upon rows of numbers ruthlessly pouring out every second. Among many other things, advertisers track the number of times their ads come up and are clicked upon. Sites and audiences are more niche and are highly segmented. The algorithms for and definitions of "engagement" vary for every site and every company.
Time spent just isn't a good indicator of engagement. Someone who spends five minutes a day on a site, goes to five different stories each visit and adds comments twice a week is clearly more engaged than someone who comes onto a site for 30 minutes a week and clicks idly on a few pages while talking on the phone.
How many times have you spent 30 minutes or so on a site, flipping and flapping through what seems like a million page views in a fruitless attempt to find something? Maybe you spent 30 minutes in such a visit once – and never went back.
A news org's success in the long-term will be based not on how much time people spend on a site but what they do once they're there.
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How Time Spent on a Site is Calculated
News Numbers 