|
|
|
|
|
|
by outsb
1537 days ago
|
|
|
The BBC article is only talking about generation time, specifically not download time (including linked assets), and we have no idea about dwell time. It only takes a 3G connection a few miles outside a city to add another 500ms to that opening request. Say we're up to a second before some readable text appears, now we'd like to know how long the user will actually spend reading the text or waiting for images to load before navigating again. Intuitively, I think that load time/dwell time ratio probably captures what those studies talk about better than just raw numbers. 1 second between 10 second TikTok video loads would be extremely noticeable, but barely worth mention if the user instead was spending 10 minutes reading e.g. a feature length news article. My personal BBC reading habit regularly involves clicking into an article just to catch the opening paragraph and seeing which opening image they used (they rarely use the same for the thumbnail). The average is probably not as low as 10 seconds, but it's certainly something much less than 2 minutes. Dwell time probably isn't a great way to capture it either. My pattern is quite "flicky" but I bet there is a spectrum all the way from "reads every last word" to "literally just loves to click". I guess latency becomes increasingly important for folk further along that spectrum |
|
|
My point is just that there's a lot of room before it even hits the numbers quoted by the various 'studies', and given those studies all tend to be from perspectives of advertisers and click through rates (i.e., giving people time to wait makes them go "wait, do I even care about this?", whereas this is someone explicitly looking to a news source), it hardly is the problem the parent presents