Ev Williams, CEO of Medium, writing about why metrics are hard; especially when attempting to measure the value of Internet businesses.
We pay more attention to time spent reading than number of visitors at Medium because, in a world of infinite contentwhere there are a million shiny attention-grabbing objects a touch away and notifications coming in constantlyits meaningful when someone is actually spending time. After all, for a currency to be valuable, it has to be scarce. And while the amount of attention people are willing to give to media and the Internet in general has skyrocketedlargely due to having a screen and connection with them everywhereit eventually is finite.