The squishiness of digital reader satisfaction.

For some reason, when a product goes digital, we quickly forget that real people use it.

We become focused instead on traffic metrics: how many pageviews did we get? Did we increase our unique users? What's our average duration?

And then we use these as a proxy for how satisfied our readers are.

Instead of running the numbers, two questions we should ask ourselves:

1.) Would I be happy with this publication? (What would I fix?)

2.) Are my readers happy with this publication? (What would they change?)

Don't try to read the data tea leaves for emotion. Just ask.