Guest Author: Tony Haile CEO, Chartbeat

This article was originally published on Digiday. Tony and the Chartbeat dvds box sets team will be at ONA13 discussing using time as the right newsroom metric. Let him know if you’ll be there and would like to meet up for a rousing data debate.

Sam Slaughter of Contently elegantly argued that the pageview as a metric of ralph lauren polo shirts traffic is failing both publishers Ping G25 Driver and advertisers. In an environment where one piece of inventory can become six with little cost and the click is more important than the christian louboutin sandales content, publishers find themselves selling a commoditized product with collapsing prices.

Brand advertisers are similarly ill-treated. They ask for their louis vuitton monogram denim target’s time and attention and instead are given a count of how many server loads occurred. They ask to advertise around engaging content, but publishers sell them a unit of value veste abercrombie homme related not to the content, but the provocativeness of the link to that content. Once a user has clicked on the link, no matter how misleading, no matter how good or bad the content, the monetizable act has occurred and the brand should pay up.

So if pageviews are killing us, now what? Any new metric for brand advertising has two jobs. For brands, it must hew to their goal of capturing their target audience’s Christian Louboutin Shoes attention. For publishers, it must be a unit of scarcity that enables premium prices for their inventory.

The metric that comes closest to that is simple: time.

For brands, time measures how successfully a publisher is capturing the attention of the audience they desire. Throw enough money around, and you can drive traffic to Louis Vuitton bags uk anything, but if you can’t capture a target’s attention when they’re there, it’s money wasted. An analysis of one international brand’s traffic from display ads found that of the thousands of visitors they bought over a multi-week period, only two users registered a non-zero engaged time. Meaning only two people read any of it.

Traditional metrics would say that campaign was a success, time calls bullshit.

For publishers, time is the one unit of scarcity on the Web: Mark Zuckerberg can add a box to Facebook and add another billion impressions to the world, but he cannot add a 25th hour to someone’s day. Moreover, monetizing on time creates viable business models for quality content. That long-form piece that holds someone’s attention for 10 minutes is worth far more than the content farm piece dashed off by the intern’s intern.

So what do we do now? We use the unit of measurement that can satisfy brand advertiser goals and create viable businesses for publishers. We don’t have to follow each other down the death spiral of chasing pageviews: there’s still time.

Tony Haile is the CEO of Chartbeat, the real-time analytics service used by 80% of the top U.S. publishers and in 37 countries around the world. He’s been Adjunct Professor of journalism at Columbia University and in 2012 was named one of the 100 most creative people in business by Fast Company.