The Engagement Gap: Most Websites Lose Users After Just 56 Seconds

Riddle Marketing Report 2025 Reveals Interactive Formats Transform User Attention and Data Quality

Saarbrücken – A new analysis ‘The global scale of engagement’ of online user behavior by Riddle, Europe’s market leader for interactive quiz formats, reveals a stark reality for publishers and marketers. The average visitor spends just 56 seconds on a standard website. Campaign after campaign confirms the pattern—users click, scroll briefly, and move on. For teams whose currency is attention, advertising, and subscriptions, this is a critical wake-up call.

“The uncomfortable truth is that content rarely fails because of its topic. It fails because it asks nothing of the user,” said Boris Pfeiffer, founder and CEO at Riddle. “Passive content no longer works. Users expect to react, interact, and participate.”

The digital landscape has shifted. Platforms like TikTok, interactive apps, and games have raised expectations for engagement. Meanwhile, publishers face growing challenges: third-party cookies are disappearing, tracking consent is declining, and data quality is falling. The old model of ‘track as much as possible and hope it works’ is no longer sufficient.

Format, Not Content, Drives Engagement
Riddle’s 2025 Marketing Report demonstrates that interactive content dramatically improves user engagement. Presenting the same material as an interactive quiz boosts average dwell time to 169 seconds—over three times longer than a static page. Across Riddle’s dataset, which includes 3.13 billion quiz, poll, and question responses, this translated into 32.8 million hours of active user attention—or 3,771 years of participation.

Interactive formats also generate high-quality, voluntary data. When users actively participate to receive a result, they provide zero-party data—information they consciously choose to share. This approach is fully GDPR-compliant, seamless, and mutually beneficial for both publishers and users. Today, Publishers face a multifaceted challenge. Increase dwell time, respect privacy, collect better data, maintain audience trust, and monetize effectively, all simultaneously. Many approaches address only one objective, limiting overall performance. Interactive content, however, demonstrates what’s possible when engagement is prioritized: users stay longer and willingly share information, fundamentally improving the publisher-audience relationship.

“The difference isn’t the content itself—it’s the format”, Pfeiffer added. “Interactive experiences don’t just buy more attention; they build trust, improve data quality, and enhance monetization opportunities.”

As the digital ecosystem evolves, the window for action is narrowing. Third-party cookies are gone, tracking consent is shrinking, and user expectations continue to rise. Publishers who thrive will be those who give users a reason to stay—through engaging, participatory formats that respect their time and privacy.

Source: The global scale of engagement, Riddle Marketing Report 2025.

About Riddle

Riddle (www.riddle.com) is dedicated to helping companies use online data to better understand their audiences. The platform offers innovative, interactive tools for creating quizzes, personality tests, mini-games, polls, and more, all designed to be seamlessly embedded into websites.

Riddle’s interactive formats increase engagement while enabling differentiated data collection. With integrated lead-generation forms, Riddle can combine quiz answers and results with user-provided information to support richer customer profiles and more targeted follow-up.

Riddle meets high data protection standards, is fully GDPR-compliant, and is ISO 27001 certified. Its mission is to help website operators understand who their users are while delivering an enjoyable digital experience.

Press Contact for Riddle Technologies

Cookie Communications GmbH   

Kathrin Müller                                                     

T: +49 (0) 40 286 686 117                            

E: kathrin.mueller@cookiecomms.com