By Mike Hawkins, Co-Founder and Country Manager in UK, Riddle.com
Attention online is fleeting. Unfortunately, many publishers don’t seem to notice.
Campaign after campaign shows the same pattern: users click, scroll briefly and move on. The average dwell time on a simple website? Just 56 seconds. Not minutes. Seconds. For marketing teams whose currency is attention, driving ads, data, and subscriptions, this should ring alarm bells.
The uncomfortable truth: content rarely fails because of the topic. It fails because it asks nothing of the user. Passive content no longer works. For years, digital experiences were built for scrolling, clicking, and moving on. But user behaviour has changed. TikTok, games, interactive apps, they’ve raised expectations. Users want to react, interact and participate.
Static websites are struggling to keep up. At the same time, publishers face mounting pressure: third-party cookies are disappearing, users increasingly reject tracking and yet data quality and dwell time are falling. The old model of ‘track as much as possible and hope it works’ simply doesn’t cut it anymore.
Change the format, not the content
The real breakthrough comes when the format changes, not the content. Present the same content as an interactive quiz and average dwell time jumps to 169 seconds – three times higher (3.02x) than a static page, according to the Riddle Marketing Report. These findings are based on Riddle’s data set of usage from 2025, where users answered 3.13 billion quiz, poll, and other question formats for publishers and brands. This translates into 32.8 million hours of attention, or 3,771 years of active user interaction.
When users can’t be tracked in the background, there’s only one solution: ask them. This is where zero-party-data comes in – information users share consciously and voluntarily in exchange for something valuable. Interactive quiz formats are one of the few digital tools where this works perfectly: the user participates to get a result, and the publisher receives data the user actively chosen to provide. Fully GDPR-compliant, seamless, and valuable for both sides. Publishers face a complex challenge: they must increase dwell time, respect privacy, provide better data, maintain trust and monetise effectively – all at once. Many formats tackle just one of these objectives and neglect the others, reducing performance overall.
Participation’s what you need
Interactive formats show what’s possible when the dynamic shifts: users stay three times longer and voluntarily share information, changing the publisher-audience relationship in a fundamental way. Engagement rises naturally, because users participate rather than just consume. The numbers are clear: 56 seconds of passive scrolling, or 169 seconds of active participation. The difference isn’t the content, it’s the format.
Publishers who adapt to this shift will find that the old trade-offs largely disappear. Dwell time, data quality, privacy compliance, and audience trust stop being competing priorities and start reinforcing each other. Interactive formats don’t just buy more attention; they build a better relationship with the audience. The window to act is narrowing. Third-party cookies are gone, tracking consent is shrinking, and user expectations keep rising. The publishers who thrive won’t be the ones who found a smarter way to track — they’ll be the ones who gave users a reason to stay.
