The Financial Times wants brands to buy online advertising in chunks of time rather than by page-views – arguing it’s a better deal for both parties.

The business read is eyeing commercial launch for the new measure by the end of the year, after trialing the concept with Chartbeat, a firm specializing in audience analytics.

“We think it's an important move for publishers and brands,” Jon Slade, the FT’s commercial director for global digital advertising and insight, tells Media Business Asia. “It’s about time we put real value into the engagement we create, and that brands get a quality output for their investment.”

The latest guidelines for online advertising suggest that advertisers should only buy ads that are seen for at least a second, even if only half is visible. Slade feels a more engaged reader has greater value. “Time is the scarce resource that brands want, not infinite ad impressions,” he reasons.

We asked Slade to explain the thinking behind the move, and how he expects the new initiative to develop.

The industry has been debating how to value and sell digital engagement for many years. What is new about this metric?

Debating the effectiveness of digital advertising, and in fact debating the effectiveness of all advertising mediums, is as old as advertising itself. In digital specifically, we’ve had flawed measures from the start: counting server pings and the click has been a poor proxy for success.

Other more engagement-focused measures – rollover, expansion, social shares – capture only a very small percentage of the potential impact of a campaign.

Measuring the attention of a web user, or the time the advertising spends in view of the user, is far closer to the ambitions of a brand advertiser. You’re not going to go a long way to further your brand ambitions, if you don’t even have your target audience’s attention.

In your trials, where are you seeing barriers and drivers of adoption?

Any currency requires consensus of understanding and acceptance on both buy and sell-side.

We’re in early days here as far as education goes; there’s no question we have work to do, to convince the market it’s worth creating a new column on the media planning spreadsheet that goes beyond impressions and clicks. We have to shape a product that fits existing systems – we get that.

But we’re really encouraged by the positivity we’ve seen from brands and agencies. The interest from other publishers is also great to see. If you have great content and great engagement, then you’re already sat on a fantastic asset. You just need to analyze and value it.

What are your forecasts for uptake and impact in 2015?

We’re modest in our ambition because we’re still in trial. But we’re hoping to see upward of 10% of our business valued on time-spent rather than merely impressions through 2015.

If three to four other major publishers also adopt our thinking – and we really encourage that – then we’re moving nicely along this journey of creating an attention economy.

Do current approaches to digital ad trading undervalue media space? If so, what other areas is the FT looking at to reset the balance?

There’s a fundamental problem in the CPM model. If we serve a thousand impressions, and 100 of those are seen for a second, 600 for five seconds and the remainder for ten seconds plus, then guess which of those impressions is doing the heavy lifting for the brand?

It’s going to trend towards those with greater exposure. Right now, we value all of them the same.

We’re absolutely looking to reset the balance there. As viewability standards emerge around mobile and video advertising, then it makes sense to continue our logic into those platforms.