T raffic Increases, Annoying Video and Calm Technology
Web traffic increases in 2019 were driven by mobile; top 100 sites saw average of 223B monthly visits
By Sarah Perez from Tech Crunch
- “According to a new report from SimilarWeb, out today, mobile web traffic has jumped 30.6% since 2017, while desktop traffic dropped 3.3%. But it’s not just the numbers that are changing. Mobile visitors also behave differently from their desktop web counterparts, staying on pages for shorter periods of time, for example, which is impacting core metrics web publishers today track.”
- “Mobile is driving these traffic increases, but mobile visitors don’t stay as long on the site. Across platforms, the overall time spent on websites has dropped by 49 seconds from 2017 to 2019, the report found.”
- “But not all categories are doing well, despite the shift to mobile. News sites, for instance, were losing traffic. The report found that traffic to the top 100 media publications is down 5.3% year-over-year from 2018 to 2019 (a loss of 4 billion visits), and down by 7% since 2017.”
Chrome is finally fixing the web’s most annoying video problem
By Matt Burgess from Wired
- “The Coalition for Better Ads, whose members include Google, Facebook, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and World Federation of Advertisers, has been researching the type of ads that people prefer online.”
- “The Coalition’s research found the least liked type of short form video ads were those that cover 50 per cent of the video, all types of mid-roll ads (ranging from six seconds to sixty seconds) and also pre-roll ads that can’t be skipped.”
- “As a result of the work, the Coalition updated its guidelines to say the three types of ads now being targeted by Chrome shouldn’t be allowed on videos.”
Calm Technology Is Staging a Comeback—Can Good Design Make it Stick?
By Liz Stinson from Eye on Design
- “In the mid 1990s, a group of researchers at Xerox PARC were already thinking about how to safeguard our vulnerable human brains from the tidal wave of information that was heading our way. They called their approach “calm technology,” and its main goal was to figure out how, in an age of technology being everywhere, designers and technologists could build hardware and software that demanded less of our attention, not more.”
- “Our devices would be smart enough to know when to alert us to something we needed or wanted to know, but otherwise they’d fade into the background. In other words, they would be calm.”
- “For big technology companies to design products that go beyond mere calm-washing will require them to rethink the business motivations that led to these design decisions in the first place.”
Nick Cotton is a project manager based out of Los Angeles, California. He’s got a background in the entertainment industry, and uses his talent at online messaging to extol the virtues of content marketing, interactive fiction and sentences measuring 280 characters or less.
FOLLOW