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# Entitlement, Page Views and Content Atomisation
- URL: https://onemanandhisblog.com/2009/05/entitlement_page_views_and_content_atomi/
- Published: 2009-05-19T17:44:01.000Z
- Updated: 2015-04-08T14:31:25.000Z
- Author: Adam Tinworth
- Tags: content atomisation, engagement, Journalism, Journalists, metrics, X (Twitter), web publishing

I think, perhaps, that much of this sense of entitlement is rooted in  
the fact that magazine or newspaper packages conceal the popularity of  
each item within – people have to buy the whole package, and it’s hard  
to determine what they read and what they don’t. (Market research is  
great for telling you what people think they should like, not what they  
actually do…)

And so we merrily assume, on a subconscious level at least, that our  
audience is actually a big chunk of the thousands of readers who pick  
up our titles. (Although some, as [Angus](http://www.angusbatey.com/?ref=onemanandhisblog.com) [pointed out](http://twitter.com/angusbatey/status/1845901755?ref=onemanandhisblog.com),  
might assume that people are reading everybody else’s stuff. And as a journalist who has occasionally lacked self-confidence, I can identify with that.) This assumption is challenged by the web, which is one reason some  
journalists get very, very twitchy indeed when you start talking about  
page impressions – a point [Peter Houston](http://magazines2020.wordpress.com/?ref=onemanandhisblog.com) made in [this morning’s discussion](http://twitter.com/P%5FHouston/status/1846986938?ref=onemanandhisblog.com).

This, though, is an inevitable consequence of the atomisation of  
content that the web brings. We might still be building websites, but  
people interact with those sites one page at a time. That’s the nature  
of the web – any page can link to any page, and people’s reliance on  
search for navigation means that the home pages we build and the  
navigation structures we try to impose on our sites are, to say the  
least, optional.

Each piece of content on the web lives on its own, freed from the  
constraints of the “package”. And that can be frightening and  
liberating. And we need to figure out ways of building audiences one page at a time.

(This has turned into quite a long post, given that had “didn’t have much to add”, hasn’t it?)