That video clips or listicles completely void of any importance, let alone transcendence, can become viral is one of the big cruelties of modern times. In the scramble for clicks, newspapers are completely ignoring the added value of dispatches from the front in warzones or investigation that has taken months. The latest viral idiocy will take all the advertising money, because somehow millions of users rush to click on it or find it irresistibly funny. Monday Note’s Frederic Filloux is proposing a new benchmark: measure engagement time and charge advertisers accordingly. He contends that great writing in The New York Times, for example, will engage readers long enough as to see ads. And he quotes a Chartbeat study to support his contention: Visitors who read for more than 75 seconds see more than 60 percent of advertisements. “To put it another way,” Filloux says, “ads are much more viewable on pages that people actually want to read.” It is, we believe, a good proposal to restore common sense in an industry that has run amok in the era of Internet upheavals.