Mediafly Feb 2022: 13 min vs 8.5 min engagement on interactive vs static — but the measurement was B2B sales decks, not marketing websites

Claim: The widely-cited "interactive content generates 52.6% more engagement; users spend 13 min on interactive vs 8.5 min on static" statistic traces to a single Mediafly press release dated February 23, 2022.

Source: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-research-reveals-207-spike-in-digital-sales-content-consumption-during-the-pandemic-with-interactive-content-seeing-a-94-higher-increase-in-engagement-than-static-content-301488063.html

Confidence: Verified for the original publication. Strong caveat for re-use: the measurement was on 232,955 users in 99 customer environments using Mediafly's Presentify product — a B2B sales-enablement deck tool. Not marketing-website visitors. The stat has been repeatedly recycled as a marketing-website claim with no equivalent rigor backing the substitution.

Rule for Candid writing: if this stat appears in a piece, attribute and disclose the B2B-deck context, or drop it. Do not let it stand as a marketing-website benchmark.

Used to demonstrate: the discipline of RULE: Every non-trivial claim carries a named source with author/institution + date + URL. Confidence flag honest. and the more general "don't recycle stats without methodology" principle.