Words Matter for Surfers

In the cyberspace smorgasbord of text, graphics, streaming video, audio and invitations to interact, words matter most among Web surfers seeking news online, research suggests.

A joint study by Stanford University and the Poynter Institute in 2000 relied on small cameras to watch the every move of news readers' eyes as they browsed through sites. And the findings surprised researchers, Net-heads and longtime print media readers alike.

Surfers seeking news focus mainly on text and, if they check out photos and graphics at all, normally do so after reading the text. That's precisely the opposite of what any long-time print journalist knows: Magazine and newspaper readers' eyes go first to photos and graphics, then decide what to read.

The ongoing study, which began two years ago, closely tracked the online habits and eye movements of 67 Internet news readers in Chicago and St. Petersburg, home to Poynter, the highly regarded center that focuses on research and educational seminars for journalists. The researchers tracked 40 hours of news surfing for each reader, for a total of 24,530 mouse clicks and 610 site visits.

Among key findings of the study:

• 92 percent read the text on Web pages, but only 22 percent looked at graphics -- for an average of about a second -- on the same pages.
• Surfers read an average of 75 percent of each Web article they clicked on, compared with print readers' average of only 30 percent of each article.