Comments on: Measuring reader engagement by how often they copy and paste

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 11:42:00 +0000

Thanks for explaining these information. nice to see and read this.
Mass
Profit Formula

By: Emphasis // Zach Seward

Emphasis // Zach Seward — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 05:15:19 +0000

[...] motivates a user to highlight? When I last wrote about this in 2009, I said, “I’m not sure precisely what that’s measuring, but it feels like [...]

By: Club Troppo » Copy, paste and curse

Club Troppo » Copy, paste and curse — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 03:32:14 +0000

[...] But the annoying link is only the beginning. Tynt’s software (formerly known as ‘Tracer‘) also lets publishers know what visitors are copying. At Nieman Journalism Lab Zachary Seward writes: [...]

By: Goyal

Goyal — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 13:41:41 +0000

does it work with other languages content such as hindi?

By: Garrett

Garrett — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 22:20:41 +0000

interesting stuff. Would never have even crossed me mind to track something like that

By: Bloggasm » The difficulties of reader retention

Bloggasm » The difficulties of reader retention — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 19:53:34 +0000

[...] Journalism Lab has a piece up today on some of the science and tools that could be factored into measuring reader engagement: Even on [...]

By: Darwin

Darwin — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:35:53 +0000

If someone else finds this page via google and is, like I was, trying to figure out how to disable this :

a) install noscript addon for firefox.
b) visit http://tcr.tynt.com/
c) right click on the page, Noscript -> “mark tynt.com as untrusted”

=darwin

By: Cut. Paste. Link. | LOHAD - random rumblings on marketing and more

Cut. Paste. Link. | LOHAD - random rumblings on marketing and more — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 14:35:41 +0000

[...] to know more about it? Check out this post from back in July over at The Nieman Journalism [...]

By: Why SEO is a Load of Crap – Accidentally in Code

Why SEO is a Load of Crap – Accidentally in Code — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:17:29 +0000

[...] inflating your ranking, your content determines whether they’ll come back. There’s some new and cool ways to measure “engagement” with a site, such as seeing what people have highlighted, cut and paste etc. So as those kind of [...]

By: Why SEO is a Load of Crap « Kitten’s Thoughts

Why SEO is a Load of Crap « Kitten’s Thoughts — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 21:11:59 +0000

By: What The Associated Press’ tracking beacon is — and what it isn’t » Nieman Journalism Lab

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:25:02 +0000

[...] doesn’t the AP simply mean copy and paste the text of an article? While there’s been some innovation in the field lately, it’s difficult to imagine how the beacon could survive the magic of Ctrl+C, and [...]

By: Robb Montgomery

Robb Montgomery — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 13:41:38 +0000

Maybe it does not work with Safari?
I like to see heat map and eye tracking feedback but I suspect that there are a still great number of variables with the end-user’s browser usage to make this data unreliable at best.

By: 15 More Recent Content Strategy Articles « new media mentality

15 More Recent Content Strategy Articles « new media mentality — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:52:39 +0000

[...] Zachary M. Seward: Measuring reader engagement by how often they copy and paste [...]

By: Amber

Amber — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 17:24:42 +0000

That is a genius concept. I don’t see how any journalist could be unhappy about this. I doubt many people would be too frustrated by the link, I found it to be helpful. Often I copy and paste something from an article to someone, then they immediately ask for the link to the whole story.

By: links for 2009-08-03 « A little Jack with that?

links for 2009-08-03 « A little Jack with that? — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:35:46 +0000

[...] Measuring reader engagement by how often they copy and paste >> Nieman Journalism Lab, Harvard… [...]

By: Game Copy Niche. | Used Review

Game Copy Niche. | Used Review — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 10:29:16 +0000

[...] Measuring reader engagement by how often they copy and paste … [...]

By: Michelle

Michelle — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:42:44 +0000

Thanks for explaining what those annoying “read more” insertions in my copy-pastes are about. I’ve run into them a few times lately, and figured it was some kind of too-clever-by-half JavaScript work: what do I win? I can see the value from the content originator perspective, but from the perspective of this Twitter-using, trying-to-copy-120-characters-at-most end user, it’s *super* exasperating.

By: Levi

Levi — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 17:42:51 +0000

We’ve always found it very difficult to help a Client understand that even though a metric, like bounce rate, looks high there might still be some value from the traffic. The heat map may be the best visual tool available to show what a visitor is doing on a page.

To Kristen’s point that some people highlight as they read (I do it all the time) the data is still valuable. For example, if someone is highlighting the text without copying they’re still reading it. Derek’s reply was perfect.

Overall, this is a definite tweet; great article!

By: New Software for Measuring Reader Engagement Online « Britt Brouse : Writer + Editor

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:15:41 +0000

[...] why this article on Nieman Journalism Lab’s site caught my eye. It’s written about a new piece of [...]

By: Technology news - Techvibes Blog

Technology news - Techvibes Blog — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 03:54:21 +0000

[...] based startup Tynt and their product Tracer were blogged about by writer Zachary Seward at the Nieman Journalism [...]

By: Web and Tech Links: 30 July 2009

Web and Tech Links: 30 July 2009 — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 01:56:35 +0000

[...] Journalism Labs: New method tracking engagement? Measuring reader engagement by how often they copy and [...]

By: Paul Bradshaw

Paul Bradshaw — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:23:55 +0000

As you know Zach, I wrote about this last week (http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2009/07/24/copying-text-from-a-daily-mail-article-youll-get-a-url-at-the-end/) and the most interesting elements came out in the comments and trackbacks. One user found he couldn’t copy and paste at all from one site using Tynt (or similar – I can’t imagine there are any competitors given how clever this is).

By: Population Statistic

Population Statistic — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:19:14 +0000

TYNT-ED COPY-AND-PASTE…

If you’ve copied a chunk of article text off of Politico or the New York Daily News websites lately, you might have noticed a surprise: An accompanying “read more” hyperlink appearing at the end of that pasted excerpt (and it is just …

By: Derek

Derek — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:51:58 +0000

Thanks Zachary for the great article about Tynt Tracer. I wanted to add a couple notes you might find interesting:

- if a site/blog is concerned about users not appreciating the link, you can turn the attribution feature off and simply measure the engagement stats. A handful of our sites run this way today, although most use the attribution feature.
- @Michael Becker – thanks for highlighting the glitches with the auto-hyphenation apps, I will have our QA team check into that. We are still in Beta and looking for any of these sorts of issues. And re the FF plain text plug in, Tynt Tracer should still record the copy action and relevant details in your dashboard, only the attribution link disappears. The percentage of users who use these plug ins is quite small and in aggregate don’t really impact the results significantly
- @Kristen – in fact we do track ‘selects’ as well as ‘copies’ so you can see that in your user actions as well.

Cheers!

Derek

By: Kristen

Kristen — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:42:22 +0000

Zach, this is interesting–I have a few friends who always highlight the paragraph on the page to keep their place while they are reading, I wonder if this is another sort of user behavior to track (like eye movements) not necessarily related to pasting.

Also, they tend to click and highlight paragraphs randomly and not with any particular intention, which might make these clicks, um, just clicks.

By: Tracer by Tynt | Hypercrit

Tracer by Tynt | Hypercrit — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:36:46 +0000

[...] reading Zachary Seward’s article at the Nieman Journalism Lab about the new service Tracer, I decided to give it a try. Tracer is a [...]

By: Michael Becker

Michael Becker — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:33:02 +0000

I had to try this after reading your article. I’ve got it installed on my blog right now and have already run into a couple of quirks — it doesn’t play particularly well with any hyphenation or typography plugins (for WordPress at least). And my Firefox “copy as plain text” add-on completely negates the script and only copies the selected text.

I’m going to keep it running for a while though, just to see how it works on the backend, which is, as you say, pretty impressive.