Title: Long-Form Reading Shows Signs of Life in Our Mobile News World | Pew Research Center
Headings: Long-Form Reading Shows Signs of Life in Our Mobile News World
Long-Form Reading Shows Signs of Life in Our Mobile News World
Terminology
Pagination

Content: For both story lengths, they spend the longest average engaged time in the late night and morning hours: 128 seconds late at night for stories 1,000 words or longer and 60 seconds for stories shorter than 1,000 words. In the morning, the figures are 126 seconds and 59 seconds, respectively. The gap between long- and short-form engaged time also persists across all five ways visitors can arrive at news articles (such as through a link from an external website, social media, search etc.) – though those who follow a link on their phone from within the same website spend the greatest amount of time with an article. Long-form news readers spend an average of 148 seconds with a news article when arriving there from an internal link. That falls to 132 seconds for those who visit the article directly or follow an email link, 125 when arriving from an external website, 119 from search and 111 from social media. For short-form reading, the average times are lower but social media is again at the bottom. Nonetheless, social media sites drive the largest share of traffic overall – accounting for roughly 40% of cellphone visitors to both short- and long-form news. There are some noteworthy differences in the nature of the visits coming from two of the larger social networking sites – Facebook and Twitter.