Priority: normal
X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v2.42a)
Sender: owner-online-newspapers@marketplace.com
Precedence: bulk
Status: RO
X-Status: 

> << What I am trying to determine is whether any has done
>  scientific work on the subject of scrolling.  I did learn that one major
>  online content provider found that only 10 per cent of its users
>  scrolled from the first screen.  So the provider resigned its pages to
>  include NO scrolls.  I am looking for this kind of evidence if it
>  exists.   >>

What's your baseline? In many cases we seem to react to online stats
as if they were something new and different when in fact they only
confirm what we always should have known. We know so little about
traditional readership, either because we don't have good stats or
don't understand the ones we have, that we assume completely 
different schema are at work online when, in fact, online readership 
may be no different than print readership.

When we talk of online scrolling, for example, we're not talking
about the percentage of those who start a story divided by those who
finish it all the way through the jump. We're talking about the
percentage who, when handed a page containing a story (and others),
choose to follow this one particular story all the way to its
conclusion. 

In print, 10% would be a huge number for this. The typical person
may read no more than 1% of the stories offered him. Those who
follow stories through to their jumps are an even smaller number.

It's not the structure or design that's a problem in either case. Its 
the interest level, time available, relative value and ease of use of 
each individual story. 

Only if we foolishly believe that non-journalists read the paper as
methodically as journalists might do we fret when we hear that a typical
reader selects only 1 of 100 stories offered him. We've spent decades 
blissfully ignoring that the same sort of rejection rate that occurs 
every time we hand a reader a fat daily newspaper.

 

From owner-online-news@marketplace.com Tue Sep 17 22:43:10 1996
Received: from marketplace.com (majordom@marketplace.com [206.168.5.232]) by cnj.digex.net (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id WAA03375 ; for ; Tue, 17 Sep 1996 22:43:10 -0400
Received: (from majordom@localhost) by marketplace.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) id QAA21385 for online-news-outgoing; Tue, 17 Sep 1996 16:10:10 -0600
Received: from server.indra.com (server.indra.com [204.144.142.2]) by marketplace.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id QAA21379 for ; Tue, 17 Sep 1996 16:10:04 -0600
Received: from indra.com by server.indra.com (8.7.4/Spike-8-1.0)
	id PAA23254; Tue, 17 Sep 1996 15:53:30 -0600 (MDT)
Received: from ginger.vnet.net by indra.com (8.7.4/Spike-8-1.0)
	id PAA01184; Tue, 17 Sep 1996 15:53:17 -0600 (MDT)
Received: from vnet.net (elvis.vnet.net [166.82.1.5]) by ginger.vnet.net (8.6.13/8.6.12) with SMTP id QAA00542; Tue, 17 Sep 1996 16:58:03 -0400
Received: from dorileyK.vnet.net (ACCS-AS29-DP09.snfc.grid.net) by vnet.net with SMTP id AA18732
  (5.67b/IDA-1.5); Tue, 17 Sep 1996 17:52:49 -0400
Message-Id: <323F1D47.41EA@inter-active.com>