We built attention minutes to look at a wide range of signals — everything from video player signals about whether a video is currently playing, to a user’s mouse movements, to which browser tab is currently open — to determine whether the user is still engaged. The result is a fine-grained and unforgiving metric that tells us whether people are really engaged with our content or whether they’ve moved on to the next thing.

Durga Raghunath, VP, Product and Executive News, Firstpost said that readers are going to mobile and websites. "The personal relationship that readers have had with newspapers has been replaced by smartphones and social media. It’s a battle for attention minutes as much as it is for media," she added.

Attention is a scarce resource, both temporally (we have only a certain number of attention-minutes in our lives) and at any one time (we can only pay simultaneous attention to a limited number of focal targets). Each communication consumes some of the recipient’s attention.