ChasNote

Earlier today I did a talk at Stanford’s Future of Media conference. The infographic notes version looks like this, courtesy of Nick deWild:

Here are links to sources for the stats and quotes I cited:

MIT’s Ethan Zuckerman proposes that we measure media attention in units called Kardashians.

NBC’s Jeff Zucker says “we are trading analog dollars for digital dimes.” (More recently he’s upgraded dimes to quarters.)

Google’s Hal Varian on news readership habits by platform is published here and here.

We bought 457 million eBooks in 2012.

Barack Obama is a binge-watcher.

Buzzfeed readers who read that 6000-word article on Detroit real-estate on their phones spent, on average, 25 minutes doing so.

You can read the rest of Caitlin Flanagan’s feature, The Dark Power of Fraternities, here. And Amy Chua’s story, Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior, here.

Estimates that House of Cards has between two and five million viewers come from here.

People who read the Sunday paper spend, on average, 57 minutes.

I gave a very short presentation today at sfBIG‘s The Big Minute on the topic of reading habits across devices and settings. (If it takes you longer than 80 seconds to read this post, you read slower than I talk!)

1 minute
Time we spend reading a newspaper’s website, which we tend to do at work on a laptop.

5 minutes
Time we spend, on average, reading a Buzzfeed list, which we also do mostly at work.

25 minutes
Time spent reading that 6000-word Buzzfeed story about Detroit, if we were among the people who read the story on a phone.

27 minutes
Time we spend reading the newspaper, if we get the print version and read it over breakfast.

57 minutes
Time we spend reading the Sunday print newspaper, since — presumably — breakfast on Sunday lasts longer.

115 minutes
Time we spent tuned-in to the last live issue of Pop-Up Magazine, an evening of “performance journalism” that takes place periodically at Davies Symphony Hall on a week-night after work.

So then, I asked, which publishing form-factor is best if the goal is to maximize reading minutes? Is it the Web, smartphones, printed magazines, or maybe live events performed onstage? How about stone tablets??

Actually: Format doesn’t really matter. The relevant factor, it turns out, is where we do our reading. You’ll get the best results, as a publisher, if you reach a reader outside of work — away from the distractions of email, IM, meetings and, well, work. People engage much more deeply with media when they’re at the breakfast table before work, or at night or during the weekend. If you can reach a person during those windows of leisure time, he or she will give you a whole lot more attention.

(Sources: 1, 27 and 57 come from here; 5 and 25 from here; and 115 from the official time-keeper at Pop-Up Magazine.)

In The Rise of Curiosity Journalism Ian Bogost explores the odd news that the most-viewed story published online by The New York Times in 2013 wasn’t a story at all; it was an interactive widget that quizzed and then mapped American regional dialects. “It’s certainly startling. But is it really surprising? Perhaps not, once we consider the dominant patterns of online attention.”

Those dominant patterns include the fact that so many of us fill our media diets by following links shared by our friends on Facebook and Twitter, the more “curious” the better. What’s most interesting to me, though, is the story’s timing — it published in the work-free window between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, and still landed in the Number One spot among popular NY Times stories for the whole year:

On the one hand, the week of Christmas and New Year’s seems like a terrible time to publish anything; readers are often traveling or visiting with family. But on the other hand, this downtime also offers a great opportunity to play with distractions like a dialect quiz.

Maybe downtime — if that’s the opposite of work time — isn’t just the best time to publish regional-dialect curiosities and listicles. Perhaps all media longer than a Vine requires a the kind of attention we reserve for leisure time.

Take news, for instance. People who still get newspapers tend to read them over breakfast before work, and that kind of news reader spends 27 minutes with the paper. When we read news on our laptops — a context where news is competing with work activities like email, instant messaging, and the meeting we’re late for — we spend, on average, only one minute per day with a newspaper website. On Sunday, the most downtime day of the week, readers of print newspapers spend 57 minutes, more than twice the time they carve out for the weekday paper. (Stats and further insights at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism’s site.)

There’s nothing magical about paper as a format, either. People who read digital news on tablets (instead of on phones or laptops) spend print-like chunks of time with their newspapers. According to Google chief economist Hal Varian (from his September 2013 speech at the E Giornalismo awards ceremony in Italy):

If you look at the time-of-day pattern of online news readership across devices you see that searches for news are concentrated during the working day. On mobile phones, news reading is spread out across the day. Tablet use, on the other hand. peaks in the morning and evening hours. This is because tablets, unlike phones and computers, are primary used for leisure-time reading.

And phone reading isn’t just for short-form workday snacking anymore either. A recent viral hit at Buzzfeed, a 6000-word piece called Why I Bought a House in Detriot for $500, got phone readers to spend more than 25 minutes reading it, which was twice the time spent reading by its tablet readers.

Maybe the crisis of modern publishing isn’t that we just can’t pay attention any more (although some sources say our attention spans have shrunk by fifty percent in the past decade), or that bits are inherently less monetize-able than atoms. Maybe it’s simply that we push our wonderful, engaging media out to consumers in the wrong context, when bosses and workplace distractions prevent them from giving us the time of day.

From Tom Fishburne at Marketoonist. He posted the cartoon back in September as commentary on Advertising Week, but I just spotted it now. (Thanks, Glasgow!) From his post:

It’s true that content marketing holds great promise, as marketers start to create communication that is genuinely worth sharing. Yet, in creating content, we should remember that consumers don’t necessarily want “content.” They want stories. “Branded content” and “content marketing” is insider terminology used by marketers. It’s up to marketers to make the content into something more meaningful.

In the branded content bandwagon, there is too often an emphasis on quantity over quality. Content is treated like a commodity. Consumers can see many forms of “branded content” a mile a way, and it’s only a matter of time before they learn to tune it out as readily as other forms of advertising.

What could I possibly add to that?!

Everybody knows print is dead, but we often overlook just how hazardous the format can be for the rest of us. The new weekend magazine from The Guardian and Observer is being called “dangerously great” by Adweek. In its latest ad, The Guardian recommends readers consume its newest print product only in moderation. Here’s what happens to one fictional reader who fails to heed that advice.

An office mate of mine showed me some old copies of magazines he picked up at a garage sale, including this May 1960 issue of Mechanix Illustrated. With features on how to assemble your own trailer and build your own amazing jet boat, and a behind-the-scenes profile of gunpowder-powered projectiles (the one-handed shotguns used by the Santa Monica police), it’s the Make Magazine of its era.

I was delighted to spot this ad for the Charles Atlas exercise book, and its promise to convert readers into He-Men. (I had never seen the actual ad before, but I knew of its existence from my grandfather’s old joke in which he claims to have sent the following letter, six weeks after ordering the book: “Dear Mr Atlas. Thank you for the book. I read the whole thing, now please send the muscles.”)

My favorite thing about the ads in general, though is that — unlike so many viral and (bad) native campaigns you see today — these vintage ads aren’t afraid to be ads. They show a pride in their company’s products and they couldn’t be more transparent in their salesmanship. “Replace those old [spark] plugs with new full-firing Champions.” “Dollar for dollar, drill for drill — now is the time to buy” a Black and Decker drill. “The man to see is your Chevrolet dealer — and there’s no better time than now.” I don’t know how many cars or drills or spark plugs these ads would sell to the ad-fatigued consumers of 2013, but at least they’re not playing deceptive games with typeface to fool us into looking.

It’s 47 minutes long, but make the investment. It’s a tribute to creative pathfinders and an object lesson for business people in media. One thing both groups can agree on, he says, is that the long run will reward the risk-takers. Tell great stories really really well, and audiences won’t just watch you — they’ll carry you on the bus and take you to the hairdressers. How can anyone argue that our attention spans have shrunk to the size of tweet when we now watch 13-hour TV seasons in a day?

Sunset Magazine launched in 1898 as the era’s equivalent of an in-flight magazine, published by the Southern Pacific Transportation Company to convince prospective railroad tourists that the West wasn’t as wild and crazy as popular literature of the time made it out to be. Maybe some of those Sunset Magazine-reading tourists would even buy a plot of California land from the region’s biggest land-owner, the same Southern Pacific Transportation Company. Thirty years later the magazine relaunched (under new ownership) as a Western lifestyle magazine that looked more like the forebear to the current publication, with its renowned testing kitchen, wine cellar and Cliff May-designed headquarters in Menlo Park.

When you’ve survived more than a century, especially in the magazine business, you have to feel a sense of pride. I mean, if I were in their shoes I’d be downright cocky, too busy taking victory laps to pay much attention to digital reinvention. (Come find me at the ChasNote headquarters in 2104 if you don’t believe me; I’ll be unbearable.)

So it’s pretty cool to see what they’re up to today: A new partnership with Curious.com, the online learning platform, to turn lifestyle content into adult education for upscale foodies. Each seminar consists of video tutorials, exercises, and a Q&A backchannel. A nice marriage of the traditional (one segment dusts off a 1966 stuffing recipe) and the cutting-edge, and a clever move for a hundred-year-old print brand that’s looking to engage a new generation of digital readers.

Friggin awesome.

UPDATE 12/11/13: Less awesome is that this commercial has unleashed the lawyers on all sides. The Beastie Boys are suing GoldieBlox, and GoldieBlox is suing the Beastie Boys. From GigaOM:

When news of the lawsuit broke out in November, many rushed to defend GoldieBlox as the underdog in a classic David and Goliath case. But when more details emerged, some (including me) suggested the toy maker had drummed up the legal fuss as part of a cynical campaign to goose sales before the Thanksgiving shopping season. The lawsuit also led to intense debate about whether GoldieBlox’s use of the song qualifies as “fair use” — a legal rule that allows people to use copyrighted work for parody, news reporting or other uses that meet a four-part test.

I knew something was wrong when I could actually answer the first few clues in a New York Times Sunday Magazine crossword puzzle. (One Across: Ask ___ what your country…. Answer: Not!! And then Two Down: JFK’s office shape. Answer: Oval!!) And what was it doing on Page 11? On a normal Sunday I can read most of the essays without even getting to the magazine’s back pages and seeing the damn thing, which always tempts me to try my luck and ultimately feel crossword inept. Perhaps the JFK-on-PBS ad below the puzzle, or “Advertisement” at the top should have tipped me off. Well, whatever. So it’s an ad. A good one, in my opinion. For lame crossworders like me, it was a novel and pleasant experience to find myself filling in some squares on crossword puzzle inside the Sunday Magazine. And the JFK trivia did spark my interest in the latest installment of the Kennedy files. Maybe I’ll tune in to PBS tomorrow at 9/8c.