Every year, we publish a list of readers’ favorite New Yorker pieces, and every year we encounter the same problem: there’s no precise way to measure popularity online. Or, perhaps more accurately, there are multiple ways, and they each tell a different story. Unique visitors—the sheer number of people who have landed on a story—is the bluntest of metrics. For publications sustained by advertising revenue, this number is key, because each visit, no matter how brief, generates some incremental amount of revenue. But the number fails to capture whether these readers stick around and form any kind of loyalty to a publication. Engaged minutes, the term for the total amount of time that readers spend on a piece, is more helpful.
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