March 10, 2007: Gambling and Online Media: Closer Than You Think?

We're always thinking about audience engagement. How can we get people to come to the site more frequently and stay longer? That train of thought led to today's oddball idea. Can the informal nature of the web help condition audiences to visit your site more often?

The idea of partial reinforcement is a key concept in psychology. The gist, if you were napping during Psychology 101, is that rewarding behavior at unpredictable intervals provides the strongest reinforcement for that behavior; in other words, maximizes the likelihood of frequent repetition. A common example is the random payouts of a slot machine. Many psychologists believe that gambling's unpredictable outcome is part of why it's so addictive. Wikipedia has a rather academic discussion of reinforcement, if you want to understand the phenomenon in more detail.

Which brings us to online media. Back in the old days (pre-21st century) media typically strove for a high degree of predictability. Newspapers, magazines, and broadcasts were made available on a schedule that was usually tightly tied to the clock and/or calendar. Those in charge took pride in setting and meeting time-sensitive deadlines--and a deadline-centric attitude still prevails in offline media today.

As in so many other areas, things are different online. The 24/7 nature of the web makes deadlines obsolete; content can and should go live as soon as it's created. So what does that mean for the audience? Sometimes they come to your site and not much has changed from their last visit a couple of hours ago. Five minutes later, you post a blockbuster news article. Sometimes their behavior of visiting your site is rewarded, or reinforced; but not always. To continue receiving rewards, they must continue to visit despite the uncertainty. Your web site becomes a content slot machine. Often there's no payout; sometimes there's a small payout; and occasionally there's a big one. Unpredictability is a key driver of repeat visits.

Many types of online content support this model. For example, online, the vehicle of choice for opinion is a blog. A key difference between blogs and their offline cousins, columns, is the posting schedule. Columns appear on a regular print agenda, but blog posts are at the random whim of the author. With discussion groups and much other user-generated content, the random frequency with which people visit the site amplifies the volatility of their random decisions to contribute content.

I'm not a psychologist and shouldn't try to play one on the web, but the analogy is intriguing. Perhaps a deeper dive into web analytics will shed some light on how strongly the partial reinforcement principle is affecting audiences online.