Eyetrack: A History of News Consumer Behavior
The latest Eyetrack study on news websites is the third examination of news consumer behavior conducted by The Poynter Institute and its partners over the last 13 years. Through Eyetrack research, we've learned about how news consumers interact with print editions of newspapers (Eyetrack I, 1990-1991) and first-generation news websites (Eyetrack II, 1999-2000).

'Eyes on the News': Print Eyetracking - 1990-91

Way back in the late 1980s, The Poynter Institute first got interested in learning more about news consumers' behavior through eyetracking research. Poynter affiliates Mario Garcia and Pegie Stark Adam, working with researchers and EYE-TRAC Research technology from Gallup Applied Science of Princeton, New Jersey, conducted the first eyetrack studies of print-newspaper readership. Their findings were published in 1991 in a book, "Eyes on the News" (available from the Poynter Bookstore for $5).

The research was groundbreaking. This was the first time that a significant independent study had been conducted for the newspaper industry using eyetracking technology.

Focusing especially on the use of color, the research produced some findings that startled and surprised the news industry. In his introduction to "Eyes on the News," Poynter's Roy Peter Clark wrote: "As I read (the findings), I sat scratching my head as myth after myth about newspaper reading fell by the wayside."

Among the study's key findings:

• Color photos do not automatically draw readers. Content, size, and placement are more important.
• Readers will enter a newspaper page wherever the most powerful element is -- and are willing to follow trails that editors lay for them.
• Readers look at facing pages as single units.
• Readers are willing to accept bold, even outrageous color experiments.
• Color does not detract from a reader's acquisition of visual information.

The 1991 research was conducted in three U.S. cities: Santa Ana, Calif.; Minneapolis, Minn.; and St. Petersburg, Fla. Realistic 20-page prototypes of the major daily newspapers in those cities were created for the testing. A total of 90 people were selected for the study, and their precise eye movements recorded throughout their sessions.

Back then, eyetracking technology wasn't as sophisticated as it is today. Test subjects sat at a desk with a bulky headpiece containing two video cameras and a reflective visor, with wires attaching the unit to a computer. This was as "realistic" a reading environment as could be created given the limits of the technology at the time.

Videotape of each participant's session was analyzed to record where the reader entered a page and the number of elements -- headlines, photos, cutlines, and text -- looked at along the path through the page. By seeing how long the eye remained on any one element, the researchers determined to what degree the material was processed.

Online Eyetracking - 1999-2000

In 2000, Stanford University and Poynter researchers published data from the first eyetracking study of news websites, which offered some surprising results.

Stanford researchers, who had been videotaping news readers in their homes and offices for several years, began to use eye-tracking equipment in a laboratory setting to analyze the behavior of 67 test subjects as they viewed a variety of real news websites (though a technical problem resulted in the loss of data from some of the volunteer testers).

The testing procedure for the 2000 study (which took place the year prior) involved having volunteers don a piece of headgear -- strung with awkward wires -- that had a small camera attached, then calibrating the equipment. It was an improvement over the equipment used in the Eyetrack I study, but a far cry from Eyetrack III (the latest study), where volunteers had no headgear; a camera mounted in the computer monitor tracked their eye movements, making for a far more realistic news-reading experience.

The software for analyzing the resulting data from the tests was crude in comparison to what's available today, remembers Greg Edwards, research associate for Stanford during the 2000 study and co-founder of Eyetools, the eye-tracking company that conducted the latest round of research.

In the 2000 study, participants were told to view any news websites they wished, and given no specific instructions. The test was free-form, and researchers pored over the data afterward trying to determine trends. (By contrast, the 2003 testing was highly structured, to better learn about patterns for specific web-page characteristics.)

Results of the 2000 study surprised many people in the still-fledgling online-news industry. One finding was that online-news readers look first to text (especially briefs and photo captions), not images -- which was opposite the behavior of print news readers, as observed in the 1991 eyetracking study.

(Critics explained the discrepancy this way: While the test used a high-speed Internet connection where web-page images appeared on screen quickly, most users at that time were used to dial-up connections where text appeared first and photos scrolled slowly on the page. Perhaps users were conditioned to look for text first and were repeating patterns that had become familiar to them.)

Another surprising finding was that banner ads indeed did catch online readers' attention -- a notion that went against current thinking. Some 45 percent of banner ads were viewed by test subjects, for an average fixation time of one second, which is long enough to perceive the ad. The ads actually were viewed more often than editorial graphics. (Even in 1999, web banner ads weren't doing well, so this finding became suspect among critics.)

Here are a few more findings from the 2000 Online Eyetrack study:

• Thirty-year-olds were more likely to read local news than either 60-year-olds or 20-year-olds. And 20-year-olds read more science and sports news than did other age groups. Virtually all ages read opinion articles in healthy proportion to their total article reading.
• Eighty percent of all participants read crime and disaster coverage. Women were very slightly more likely to read this category, but men were more likely to read more items. (These judgments are based on proportion of each gender to its number in the study: 30 women, 37 men.)
• Sports, surprisingly, was read equally by males and females -- 70 percent of the total for each gender. But, no female read heavily in this category, while 11 percent of the men did. In fact, the heavy sports readers were likely to exceed the number of items read per person than in any other category.
• A higher proportion of women read local news than did men, and by a tiny margin also read more heavily in this category. Overall, 48 percent of all participants read local news.
• Somewhat more men than women read national news and by a small margin, also read more items. Overall, 67 percent of all participants did some reading of national news.

You can read more about the 2000 Poynter-Stanford Online Eyetrack study here.

Eyetrack III: 2003-04

Eyetrack III, the subject of this website, is Poynter's third media eyetracking research project. Scroll to the top of the page to find navigation links to the rest of the most recent study.