Brits prefer news to porn (but only just, and Tweeting trumps them both)

happygeek 1 849 Views

At first glance the news story headline from The Telegraph was rather comforting: Britons spend more web time reading news than looking at pornography. That's one big finger flipped up in the face of all those who decry the Internet as being a cesspool of depravity and the people who use it as bereft of a moral compass. However, when you read behind the headline things do not look quite so clear cut.

The story came about as a result of published by the United Kingdom Online Measurement Company (UKOM) which suggested that the proportion of time that the British spend looking at online porn had dropped over the last three years while online news consumption has all but doubled during that same period.

Thing is, the actual percentages are so close you might as well run a headline that says 'Brits like online news and porn' and it would have been just as accurate. Apparently we spend an average of 2.8 percent of our time consuming news while adult website browsing accounts for an average 2.7 percent of that time.

So when the newspaper followed this 'revelation' with a quote from a UKOM spokesperson that "the prevalence of web adult usage has always been greatly overestimated" which is true enough, but to suggest that these figures somehow punctured the myth that porn was behind Internet popularity is bizarre if you ask me.

For a start, choosing the news and porn numbers seems odd considering they are so close to each other and so damn small. Far better, surely, to state that social networking trumps porn online when you consider that it accounts for 22.7 percent of average online time. Or how about using email on 7.2 percent, online games playing on 6.9 percent or even instant messaging on 4.9 percent for that matter?

If anything, the number suggest that porn is of little real consequence in the overall scheme of online usage things but also suggests exactly the same of online news...

Dani AI

Generated

Good catch by — the headline is doing heavy lifting while the underlying measurement does the real talking. The useful takeaway from the study is not the sensational comparison but the bigger point: tiny, close percentages are easy to misinterpret unless you understand how the data were collected and classified.

Two measurement pitfalls to bear in mind. First, many analytics systems calculate “time on page/site” using timestamps from successive hits, so the last page in a session and single‑page (bounce) visits frequently register zero seconds unless extra events are tracked. Second, panel/aggregation studies depend on category definitions (how “news”, “social” or “adult” are tagged), device mix, and whether background tabs, auto‑refreshing feeds or embedded media were treated as active time — all of which skew time‑share numbers if not handled carefully. (builtvisible.com)

Practical checks and fixes: ask the authors for methodology (panel size, sampling, how categories were mapped, desktop vs mobile split, and raw minutes-per-user distributions). For publishers or analysts, instrument engagement instead of raw pageviews: fire on‑page events (scroll depth, video play, clicks) and use visibility/heartbeat pings so “active” time is captured, and report median as well as mean to avoid outlier distortion. A minimal browser approach is to use the Page Visibility API and send a periodic beacon only while the page is visible, for example:

document.addEventListener('visibilitychange', () => {
  if (document.visibilityState === 'visible') startHeartbeat();
  else stopHeartbeat();
});
function sendPing(){ navigator.sendBeacon('/engage', JSON.stringify({ts:Date.now()})); }

The industry has been moving from crude “time-share” toward “engaged minutes” (attention) and event‑based metrics that better reflect value to readers and advertisers — ask for those if you want a more meaningful comparison. (developer.mozilla.org)

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