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: To understand how mobile users interact with news, the study utilized audience behavior metrics provided by the web analytics firm Parse.ly, a company that supplies real-time and historical analytics to a broad mix of digital publishers, including over 170 top media companies. All told, Center researchers spent months digging deeply into the details of 117 million anonymized, complete cellphone interactions with 74,840 articles from 30 news websites in the month of September 2015. The analysis finds that despite the small screen space and multitasking often associated with cellphones, consumers do spend more time on average with long-form news articles than with short-form. Indeed, the total engaged time with articles 1,000 words or longer averages about twice that of the engaged time with short-form stories: 123 seconds compared with 57. 1
This gap between short- and long-form content in engaged time remains consistent across time of day and the pathway taken to get to the news story. However, when looking solely within either short- or long-form content, engaged time varies significantly depending on how the reader got to the article, whether it is midday or evening, and even what topic the article covers, according to the study. While 123 seconds – or just over two minutes – may not seem long, and a far cry from the idealized vision of citizens settling in with the morning newspaper, two minutes is far longer than most local television news stories today. And that print newspaper over which people linger contains many separate stories, not just one. In addition, our analysis indicates that this metric almost certainly underestimates the real time spent reading or watching a news story.