DigInThere: A free to use tool to capture reader attention and reward it

The content deluge on the internet is astronomical. In simple economic terms, supply (online content) is growing rapidly while demand (our collective attention) remains fixed, or even decreasing. With the staggering amount of content duking it out for our limited attention, it becomes increasingly important for publishers to reward thoughtful consumption in some way if they are to stay competitive.

DigInThere, our RJI fellowship project, is our attempt at combining different approaches into an easy-to-use tool to bring tangible and measurable benefits to both the newsroom and its audience. This free-to-use tool will give newsrooms an automated, customizable and verifiable way to reward their audiences for meaningful reading and interaction through short engaging quizzes on news content. Readers will then get a chance to earn various perks, like merch or tickets to live events, for giving their sustained attention to that piece of content as gauged through the quizzes.

Measuring a tsunami: “New content per minute”

As cut-throat as the competition over our finite collective attention is, it’s only bound to get more intense with the ever-increasing volume of AI-generated content further adding to the already enormous supply. 

For each passing minute, about 80,000 minutes’ worth of new content is posted to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter/X, and across various blogs. (See our calculations at the end of this article.)* Note that this figure is still a highly conservative estimate as it only considers new content generated on just a few prominent content platforms and most of the blog posts. 

Traditional newsrooms like the NYT, WaPo, WSJ, and all the local news outlets, are a drop in the bucket compared to user-generated content.

Goods and services competing for our attention aren’t restricted to the news industry. Other companies, trying to get their video games, movies, streaming content, etc., in front of the same eyeballs has created a cross-industry battle in which the global collective of news organizations are but one player.

The consequence of content oversupply on this scale are shrinking margins/returns for publishers. Some of them increasingly resort to clickbait-y content, opting into ads, gaming the algorithms on which they share their content. We’ve already seen this weaken audiences’ trust in newsrooms (e.g. clickbait’s negative impact on public perceptions of journalists’ credibility). This widespread erosion of trust in news and in those who produce it is a matter of life-and-death for independent outlets with limited resources.

Publishers have it hard, audiences have it harder

In an increasingly digitized world with an ever-growing number of options for consumption, publishers treat audiences as a given at their own peril. Perhaps as a nod to this reality, more journalism professionals started identifying a need to reward audiences for choosing to engage with their content over others’. 

Today, our biggest reward for consumption is offering news for free (or, if miracle strikes, a tote bag). One of the many problems with that thinking is that the internet at-large not only offers the same information, it offers an opportunity to comment and engage with others at a scale that’s near-impossible for newsrooms to compete with, for better or worse. (We’re looking at you, ex-Twitter.)

We hope that DigInThere will help newsrooms bring their readers back into the content, keep them engaged and returning. 

*Here’s how we calculated the content figures. (Mildly wonky!)

• On average, users upload over 500 hours of video to YouTube every minute making it 30,000 minutes of content each minute.
• The other platforms are text-based so we need to convert textual content to time by taking the number of posts each minute (P), multiply it by the average (or recommended) wordcount (W) and divide their product by the average human reading speed (S): P x W / S.
• The average reading speed of an adult is about 250 words per minute.
• In 2023, blogs produced an average of 7.5 million posts each day, and the average blog post was 1,427 words long. That’s 29,730 minutes of new reading.
• Twitter/X sees over 350,000 tweets per minute. Since 71-100 characters is the recommended length for a new tweet, this means 10-18 words, making 10 words a conservative lower estimate, which equals 14,000 minutes worth of tweets.
• Facebook has about 293,000 status updates each minute. It is recommended to keep Facebook posts at a length of 40-80 characters (e.g. 6-14 words), making 6 words a reasonable conservative estimate. Factoring in the average adult reading speed equals 7,032 minutes of new content on Facebook.

The result? 80,762 minutes of new content generated each minute.

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Cite this article

Csernatony, Zoli; and Amihere, Dana (2024, Aug. 5). With a tsunami of information on the internet, how do we keep readers returning? Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/with-a-tsunami-of-information-on-the-internet-how-do-we-keep-readers-returning/