Tony Haile, the CEO of Chartbeat, has an important piece in Time magazine on the rise, and one hopes fall, of Web design and business efforts that focus on clickthroughs. As he explains, in 1994 (20 years ago!)

a former direct mail marketer called Ken McCarthy came up with the clickthrough as the measure of ad performance on the web. From that moment on, the click became the defining action of advertising on the web. The click’s natural dominance built huge companies like Google and promised a whole new world for advertising where ads could be directly tied to consumer action.

However, the click had some unfortunate side effects. It flooded the web with spam, linkbait, painful design and tricks that treated users like lab rats. Where TV asked for your undivided attention, the web didn’t care as long as you went click, click, click….

But something is happening to the click web. Spurred by new technology and plummeting click-through rates, what happens between the clicks is becoming increasingly important and the media world is scrambling to adapt…. At the core of the Attention Web are powerful new methods of capturing data that can give media sites and advertisers a second-by-second, pixel-by-pixel view of user behavior. If the click is the turnstile outside a stadium, these new methods are the TV control room with access to a thousand different angles. The data these methods capture provide a new window into behavior on the web and suggests that much of the facts we’ve taken for granted just ain’t true.

So what have they discovered? Haile calls out four myths:

Clicking = Reading. More than half of people who click on a page spend fewer than 15 seconds reading. And those listicles, articles about fashion and celebrities that editors have thrown onto sites to boost their numbers? They don't work. Readers, it turns out, spend most of their time reading pages that are topical and content-rich, and move very quickly through junk.

Sharing = Reading. The assumption that things that are shared widely are read widely– and even that the people who share are doing so after reading– turns out to be weak. Chertbeat "looked at 10,000 socially-shared articles and found that there is no relationship whatsoever between the amount a piece of content is shared and the amount of attention an average reader will give that content," Haile says. Apparently widely-shared content is like fruitcake or one of those baskets with unidentifiable sausages and cheeses: just because you give one as a present doesn't mean you'd eat it yourself.

Native advertising is the Holy Grail. Turns out it's not working very well on most sites, but on a few (like Gizmodo) reading rates for native advertising are closer to rates for regular conetnt.

Banner ads don't work. They aren't effective when they're at the very top of the page (which is where most advertisers want them to be), partly because two-thirds of a reader's attention is spent below the fold. So banner ads at the top of the page are actually located in an area where people are less likely to direct their attention. Oops.

So what does this mean for the future of online publishing and advertising? Haile is optimistic that these insights will burst the bubble for junk content, and provide a rationale for supporting content that's actually better:

For quality publishers, valuing ads not simply on clicks but on the time and attention they accrue might just be the lifeline they’ve been looking for. Time is a rare scarce resource on the web and we spend more of our time with good content than with bad…. In the seeds of the Attention Web we might finally have found a sustainable business model for quality on the web.

I’ve been critical of efforts to capture and commoditize our attention online, but Haile's piece makes me wonder if that criticism isn't a little misdirected, or at least needs to be refined: that the problem isn't attention per se, but rather the means by which social media companies, app designers, et al have tried to get our attention. The enemy is bad metrics, leading to poor design, and lowest-common-demoninator content.

The enemy isn't efforts to grab and hold your attention: that's not inherently a bad thing at all. I don't complain when Terry Pratchett or Alan Furst write novels that grab me, or Ridley Scott make a movie that's really compelling (or a brilliant mess, like Prometheus); I consider that a good thing. Providing me with something that seriously engages me creates real value. It's not a bad thing at all.

The problem is with frivolously engaging stuff, the mental equivalent of junk food that's designed to be merely addictive rather than seriously informative. To the degree that the metrics Haile describes can help raise the value of content worthy of our attention, they should be welcomed.

(Thanks to Sarah K. Moir for calling the article to my attention.)