Asym has expanded — you can now reach 49% more readers
We’re excited to announce Asym has doubled its language base: we now support two new languages, Spanish and French. Together with our existing support for English and German, Asym can now deliver text optimization to 68% of the top 10M websites and 39% of the world’s 3.6 billion internet users.
That’s a growth in coverage of 27% more websites and 49% more readers since July 2015.
We now have people using our content optimization technology in 224 countries and an almost complete saturation of all significant U.S. business hubs.
The best news of all? Business and Personal users of the Asym platform don’t need to do anything to access the new language functionality. We’ve expanded the markets you can reach and made it completely effortless on your part.
The API, javascript widget, and the desktop browser extensions (Chrome, Safari, & Firefox), have the increased functionality baked in. In addition we are currently working on some exciting new features that will bring increased personalization and personal control over your reading experience. These features will roll out over the next couple of quarters.
Word Spacing Optimized By Language
Here is a peek at how Asym can boost engagement rates for four out of the top six content languages on the internet (Japanese and Russian remain).
Asym automatically detects the language(s) on a web page. It measures the syntactic structure for each language and creates a map of word spacing cues based on structural patterns. Asym then uses that map to create unobtrusive visual cues that draw attention to important sections in the text (hence the term ‘text optimization’). Each language has a different map, therefore each language requires a different pattern of cues to help readers chunk the text. Each language also has a different word density. Asym accounts for this and will automatically adjust spacing for languages with longer average word length such as German and French.
A Visual Representation of Languages
Each of these languages has its own unique syntactic fingerprint. For a deeper look at how Asym works, we’ve created syntactograms comparing word spacing maps for English, German, Spanish, and French. These syntactograms visually present some of the structural aspects of language we use to optimize visual cues in typography. Highlighted (bright bars) are relative adjustments to the spaces before and after certain words common syntactic words (of, the, and, and a) in each language. Warmer colors (red, orange, yellow) indicate space expansions, while cooler colors (cyan, blue, and purple) indicate space compressions (cyan, blue, and purple).
Moving Forward in Changing Times
At Asymmetrica Labs we know reading behavior is changing. We know 87% of users use more than one screen at a time. We’re familiar with the study that suggests the average human attention span has gone from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013 (famously, a goldfish’s attention span is estimated at 9 seconds). We see the world moving towards an era where attention is becoming the scarcest (and thus most precious) commodity.
As markets transition towards an economy based on attention (the attention economy), we don’t view Asym as new technology. We see Asym as a completely new medium. We are presenting text on a new surface, we are fundamentally changing the background of text, and we are doing it in a way that optimizes text for human consumption. Where some might see Asym as the right technology at the right time, we see Asym as a new medium designed for a new time.
Thanks for reading.
Chris, Ken, and Edward
P.S. Asymmetrica continues its work on new languages, along with improvements and deeper research into the languages we already support. Are there languages that are important to you or your business that we don’t yet support? Let us know!
Resources
87% users use more than 1 screen at a time — Accenture report
Attention span drop from 12 seconds to 8 seconds– Microsoft study Downloadable PDF
Tags: attention economy, readability, content optimization, text optimization
Originally published at www.asym.co on October 24, 2016.
