Small-screen cell phones with multi-tasking clutter beg the question of the future of long, content depth news reports. The debate is whether people will read lengthy news content on their cellphones. A new analysis by Pew Research Center finds that consumers do spend more cellphone time on average with long-form news articles with content depth than with shorter ones.
The total engaged time, that is time spent scrolling, clicking or tapping, with news stories that are 1,000 words or longer averages about twice that of the engaged time with shorter stories of 101-999 words in length with less content depth: 123 seconds compared with 57. Moreover, the data when analyzed closer show that engaged time increases steadily as word count increases.
“These findings suggest that on small, phone-sized screens the public does not automatically turn away from an article at a certain point in time – or reject digging into a longer-length news article. Instead, the average user tends to stay engaged past the point of where short-form reading would end, suggesting that readers may be willing to commit more time to a longer piece of work,” said Amy Mitchell, Pew Research Center’s director of journalism research.
The data also show that while shorter news content is far more prevalent than long stories with content depth – and thus draws more total traffic – long-form articles are accessed at nearly the same rate. Fully 76% of the articles studied were less than 1,000 words in length. However, long stories with content depth attract visitors at nearly the same rate as short-form: 1,530 complete interactions – all of a visitor’s interactions with an individual article – per long-form article and 1,576 per short-form.
The analysis covered 117 million “anonymized” cellphone interactions with 74,840 articles from 30 news websites in September 2015. This large data base is admittedly not fully representative of all news organizations or of all digital news users, but cuts across a mix of general and subject-specific news sites, legacy and digital-only sites and sites with large national audiences, as well as those with smaller, niche user bases.
The gap between engaged cellphone time spent on short- and news with content depth remains consistent across time of day and the route 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 late at night, and the article’s topic. An in-depth discussion of the methodology behind this study can be found here.
