How Much Time People Really Spend with Ads – eMarketer
There’s an interesting report out via eMarketer and Eyeblaster on how much time people really spend with Internet ads. An excerpt:
The difference between clicks and general interaction was huge in 2008. For example, the average worldwide click-through rate for rich media ads studied was 0.35%. The average dwell rate for those ads was a much more impressive 8.71%.

Broken down further, in North America expandable banners had only a 0.3% click-through rate, but a 7.1% dwell rate and an average user dwell time of more than 45 seconds. Other rich media formats saw similar improvements in engagement measured by dwell or interaction rate.

As the report notes, dwell time is an important metric. Internet users in North America spent the longest time dwelling on online ads appearing in the mail category, at nearly 85 seconds. Instant messaging ads were a close second, at nearly 74 seconds, with news, technology and games rounding out the top five.

via www.emarketer.com

I never know how much to trust research like this. You don’t really get that much insight into the methodology and there’s always the concern that the researchers are getting the results that they want to get (yes, that happens in advertising).

However, at least with online advertising we get SOME idea of what really happens when someone encounters an ad message. Over time, I trust these methodologies will be refined and improve. Readership studies in print developed a specific methodology over time, though anyone analyzing those reports knows that you have to really look at them closely to get underneath the data. The one big problem with print readership studies is how intrusive the research is; and even the best of this research is often loaded with built-in biases.

Online analysis has a lot more hard metrics to support it. It will bear watching to see what we really learn about this over time.