Users Spending Less Time on Single Pages

The average session length on publishers’ pages dropped below 2 minutes over the course of last year, according to Taboola data published by eMarketer. Time spent with an individual page was 1.90 minutes in the fourth quarter of 2017, down from 2.09 minutes in the first quarter of the year. This can be read as being bad news for publishers, as it indicates they get less attention from readers.

However, the likely reason for this development needn’t be that publishers' content has necessarily fallen out of favour with audiences. This slump could be due to users consuming more content directly on platforms such as Facebook et al. This data is yet another indicator, that platforms are one of the biggest challenges faced by publishers. Hopes had been that more exposure on platforms would also drive traffic on the publishers’ own sites.

This chart was first published by our media partner FIPP.