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How Eye Tracking Can Improve the Newspaper Industry

As our lives make the move into the digital age, newspapers are stuck figuring out how to keep subscriber attention while subscription rates are in decline. Newspapers have cut back their circulation, reduced the amount of pages per issue, switched to online-only editions or, in many cases, have even closed down entirely. All these approaches are reactive to the changing ways that people consume news.

When newspapers only had to compete with radio and television for viewership, it was easy to maintain a steady subscriber base. There were few other choices for people to get the daily news that matters to them, so they had to turn to their town newspaper. If they’re living in a bigger city, they might get to choose from more than one newspaper. In addition to competition amongst themselves, local and national newspapers now compete with blogs, foreign newspapers, online TV news channels like CNN, and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter plus Google for viewership.

More choices for consumers mean newspapers needs to publish news and articles relevant to their readers. They can’t just set out to “inform” as newspapers did in the past. When a news article that informs but was not relevant or wanted by the readers in the past, they still had to pay for the entire newspaper. Consumers once had to pay for the entire newspaper, even if the majority of the printed news was irrelevant to their needs. Because of the web, these days people don’t consume entire editions of newspapers, magazines, or news channels, but select by the individual article. If the title of an article is interesting, they might click on it and read more. Articles that may inform but are not clicked on are left unread, wasting a newspaper’s resources.

Eye tracking technology can help newspapers determine what their readers are interested in and deliver more of these specific kinds of information to the individual. With eye tracking, newspaper companies can gauge how readers consume their news. Are readers scanning the titles of the articles for the latest news? Are they scanning for specific sections such as business or arts? Are they confused by the navigation of the newspaper layout? Are readers inconvenienced when newspapers break an article into multiple pieces, so that readers have to hunt for the second part somewhere else in the newspaper? What about news pieces that help solve the readers’ problems? Do readers scan for those articles more than typically informational news stories?

With eye tracking, newspapers can figure out a proactive approach to retaining subscribers and may even increase readership. The end goal is to deliver what people want because, let’s face it, if they don’t want it, they won’t buy it. But to figure that out requires measurable statistics that can be achieved with eye tracking and web usability studies for online newspapers.

How Eye Tracking Can Improve the Newspaper Industry

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