cairn.com | The Counter

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The advertising industry learned to measure the moments before you decide. Now their tools are learning to govern.

It was my first week at a new job. The boss wanted me close. His two-story office was glass on two sides. One side looked out on the parking lot. The other looked in on us. From his office, we were figures behind glass, visible by default. The wall behind him had brand logos. The fourth wall was hung with rare skateboards: decks too valuable to ride, mounted in a grid. Scrappy things made beautiful by being taken out of circulation. He faced them every day. It was all new to me.

I was here because I knew how to design systems to track things that move. My advertising skills were nominal, and my new cohort spoke the lingo fluently, like people who had invented it. I needed to get up to speed.

The boss operated by changing the conditions in the room. In meetings, he would lift one person's ideas above another's, often for reasons that seemed cruel or arbitrary. A proposal praised on Monday might be dismissed on Wednesday. Someone ignored all week might suddenly become the person whose opinion mattered. It took me a while to understand that consistency was beside the point. Reaction was. He wanted response more than agreement. He was watching who rose when the room changed.

At the time I thought his game and my job were two different things. Much later I understood they were the same experiment: change one variable. Observe the response.

He did it with recognition — something that was scarcer than attention, and the one thing everyone there had come to want. The software measured interactions with content and buttons. Both systems ran on the same question: what does a person reveal when something they want is made just a little harder to reach?

The language came at me sideways, in meetings, over desks. I didn't know what it meant. It sounded like this:

"What's the dwell on the hero above the fold?"

"CTR's flat and cart abandonment's up at payment."

"Can we improve conversion?"

You learned to say these things flatly, the way you'd report the temperature outside. The flatness was the point: it was how a person scrolling a page became a set of values that you could move. Most of it decoded into something ordinary. Cart abandonment was the one we cared about most: the person who filled the basket and then, at the final screen, walked away. The whole vocabulary named the places where attention was won or lost, and somebody put prices on them.

We sold predictions. Attention was the raw material they were made from.

A click was cheap and a little suspect by 2013 because anyone could click, and bots clicked, and fingers missed sometimes. Besides, we wanted to measure what was driving those clicks. We wanted to quantify the consideration, the pause before a decision, the hesitation. We called this thing dwell. We argued successfully that dwell was worth more than a click because it had duration that suggested the magnitude of a guest's intention. A click could be accidental, but a pause almost never was.

I wanted a better tool. At the time, we measured interactions with Adobe Omniture, an enterprise analytics system built around decisions made in advance. You defined the dimensions, events, and dashboards when the system was installed. After that, the software mostly told you what you already knew.

I wanted something open and self-hosted. I wanted the raw record of each visit, so we could return later with questions we had only learned to ask after the fact. Dwell time, for example. Where on the page did people hesitate? Where did they stop reading? Where did a page seem to work because someone stayed, rather than because someone clicked?

I got nowhere. The old system stayed because the company had already arranged itself around it. Leadership trusted its reports. The sales team read its dashboards every morning. Years of careful configuration had accumulated inside it, and no one wanted to rebuild it. A way of counting people, once it is in place, comes out only when keeping it finally costs more than tearing it out — and that never happens on its own.

The mission, the one we said out loud, was good. We were helping people, mostly women, who had built real trust with real readers by reviewing small things honestly, turn that trust into a living. I believed that. Or I believed it enough. You can believe in the work and still be building an instrument that will later be aimed somewhere you would never have agreed to aim it. That is the ordinary way these things happen. The future use isn't part of a villain's plan. It is hidden in the usefulness of the tool.

I understood this slowly. I had been learning to run the instrument from inside it. Everyone in the building believed we were measuring dwell.

I didn't think about any of this again until I read a newspaper investigation this spring.

The word is older than the metric.

To dwell once meant to delay, to...