Measuring the news: what are the alternatives to pageviews?

journalims.co.uk reporting:
Pageviews often dominate the conversation in terms of measuring a website's performance, but is this the correct way to measure a news organisation's online success? And if no, what alternatives are there?

Speaking at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, these questions were posed by Pier Luca Santoro, a social media editor at La Stampa and founder of Data Hub, to a panel of experts on the issue of metrics....
Santoro suggested that, with the advent of social media, the amount of times a piece of content has been shared online could be both a quantitative and qualitative measurement of a piece of content's success.

"What makes that metric really interesting is that it's standardised," said Galant, "it's the same for any publication and it's public."

Pageviews are recorded internally and verified by independent organisations, while social shares are recorded by third parties and open for all to see.

"For the first time ever in the history of journalism we have a public, standardised metric," he said, but Haile questioned whether that truly solved the problem of measuring quality of content over a more quantitative value.

"The number of shares and the amount of attention do not sync up," he said, citing a recent Chartbeat study into audience habits on social media, that reported many people will share a story without reading it...
A more accurate metric in showing how engaged readers are in articles or other types of content may be time, suggested Haile, as it gauges the quality of content and therefore the success of a news organisation.

Advertisers have been buying on time for far longer than they have on anything elseTony Haile, Chartbeat

"The fact is advertisers have been buying on time for far longer than they have on anything else," he said, referring to television or radio advertising, and whether it's for two hours once a day or 20 seconds five times a day, time shows value because "you're competing against the entire sum of human endeavour" in gaining someone's attention.

"We've now established a common methodology," he said, "which is when you're actively attentive you're looking at the screen and doing something – scrolling, moving mouse or tapping," and Chartbeat have begun to measure the time readers spend on content as engagement....http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/measuring-the-news-what-are-the-alternatives-to-pageviews-/s2/a556640/