Auto-refresh on news sites
I won’t go into details as to why auto-refreshing a news site every 5 minutes is bad - these two posts (from 2002 and 2009) sum it up very well.
In terms of quality everyone loses: users, advertisers, and in the long run the newspaper itself. And everyone who cares about big numbers - instead about what they represent qualitatively - wins.
Remember: this basically means that if you leave your favorite news site open for an hour, it will automatically refresh 12 times, counting as 12 pageviews and serving 12 times the ads - that no-one views.
So I did a little state of the nation in terms of auto-refresh, with a special emphasis on portuguese news sites. Sadly, it seems that we’re the top auto-refreshers when compared to major international news sites.
The graph:
Notes:
- Google News, a site that has arguably the most up-to-date content from this list, and is the only one that doesn’t serve ads, refreshes every 15 minutes. So the argument for a standard would be: if your news site is extremely frequent in updates and doesn’t cheat advertisers with it, every 15 minutes should be enough.
- There are tons of techniques to update content only, without serving “blind” ads or counting fake page-views. From user activity detection to small notices inviting the user to refresh the page, there is no excuse not to auto-refresh every X minutes without any rules.
- The Wall Street Journal handles auto-refresh in two ways: the whole homepage reloads every 20 minutes, but in the meanwhile breaking news, headlines and (from time to time) ads reload every minute.
- The O Jogo website doesn’t refresh, but judging by their code and web skills I guess it’s because they never thought about that option. Otherwise they would have implemented auto-refresh right away.
