I wonder what the ratio of people actively deactivating to people silently never returning to the website/app is.
At least 1 to 10 is my guess.
At least 1 to 10 is my guess.
Which the site should be compelled to report to advertisers.
Obviously there is probably a decent amount of cherry picking of the stats to report.
Virtually any significant publishing platform has a press kit detailing circulation or equivalent numbers, which are in most cases publicly available, so far as I'm aware. I'm not finding a definitive statement as to whether or not this is required in the US, though most significant publications, and now online sites, provide similar data.
The Alliance for Audited Media (AAM) seems to be the principle source of circulation data in the US, per this Pew article (2023):
"Newspapers Fact Sheet"
<https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/newspapers...>
That also notes however:
[T]hree of the highest-circulation daily papers in the U.S. – The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post – have in recent years not fully reported their digital circulation to AAM.
And the easiest way to determine that is with a test campaign of just a few hundred dollars. Most platforms even give you "free credits" to do exactly that (in many businesses, a few hundred dollars can be a big barrier, because the employee doesn't want to put it on their personal credit card, yet getting the paperwork in place to go through the accounts department is a lot of work).
That means the platform-wide stats don't really matter. What matters is how cheaply the platform can get the right ads in front of the right eyeballs who will click through and buy a product.
How well the platform can attribute purchases is a big part of it too. Thats why people like youtube have "Which of these companies have you heard of? A. Amazon, B. Gucci, C. Flambaths" surveys - because that's their way to measure (and charge for!) brand adverts which don't lead to direct sales.