This is a very interesting and challenging article. What’s Really Killing Digital Media: The Tyranny Of The Impression.

If you support your content with online ads, that means you have to play the ad impression game. You need to re-jigger your content to get more ad impressions for each word for each visitor. What does that do to your content strategy?

It makes you chop up your content into little bits, and it makes these little bits of content more valuable than serious, long-form articles.

But … more valuable to whom? It’s not more valuable to the reader, and probably not to the advertiser. It’s more valuable to the website owner, but only because of the distortion caused by the ad impression game. And it might not be good for the publisher’s brand.

What’s the solution?

[A] growing coalition of publishers and advertisers, especially those who make high-quality stuff, want to ditch the impression altogether. Rather than try to sell ads using metrics that reward lots of clicks, these publishers, and a number of marketers, want to start selling their ads on something very different: time.

You’re already aware of the “visibility” problem with ads. A website ad that is served outside the viewing area of the page isn’t doing the advertiser any good. So there’s been a lot of work to change the metrics to only count visible ads.

But what about an ad that’s visible, but flies by so fast that nobody sees it? Is the amount of time the ad is displayed a better measure of the ad’s worth to the advertiser?

“The only way you can actually look at the amount of value someone’s placed on content is how much time they’re spending with it,” said Brendan Spain, the U.S. commercial director of the Financial Times, one of a growing number of publishers that has begun selling ads using time-based currency; it uses cost per hour.

I’m sure you noticed the slight switch in the topic in that quote. Spain is speaking about the value of the content, but the advertiser is interested in the impact of the ad. Do the two correlate?

[T]ime spent is still a kind of proxy for the thing that marketers really want, which is readers’ attention. “It is very hard, without elaborate and expensive neuroscience, to measure attention,” said Sherrill Mane, senior vice president at the Interactive Advertising Bureau. “Time spent,” she noted, is the best available proxy.

Is that enough? Is measuring how long the ad is displayed a better measure of attention?

Web designers have trained web visitors to ignore ads. We all know where they appear on the page, and we simply skip over them. So while time spent might be a better measure of attention to the content, is it a measure of attention to the ad? There’s still the issue of the “ad blindness” of the reader.

There are other issues addressed in this very fascinating article, and I recommend that you read the whole thing.