Last week, I was reminded of a study I read about 6 months or a year ago. Basically, the study said that chances are, you are not reading this. I’m not saying you’re not here. I’m just saying you are more likely to be skimming this, than reading it.
Research done in 2008 by Nielson found… “on the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely”. (So, you’re almost done reading this, then right?) It also found that “On an average visit, users read half the information only on those pages with 111 words or less.”
This matches my own experience. When I look at my RSS feeds, I have a total of 72 feeds that I’m “following” (and this doesn’t include those in facebook or twitter that I don’t import to my RSS consolidator).
- Of these, 22 are family and friends (people I personally know)
- Another 18 are folks who I’m particularly interested in the specific topic.
- The remainder are topics that interest me or relate to what I’m working on and are of interest, or are just pure entertainment.
Out of this:
- The 22 that are family and friends there are currently no unread posts.
- Of the 18 that are of interest to me, there are 363 unread posts.
- Of the remainder there are over a thousand unread posts. There is really no way I’ll be able to read everything there without losing days of my life.
This is where my skimming comes in. What I find is that even of the 18 blogs and websites that are of interest, I skim (if even that). I often only read the headlines (unless it’s on a topic of interest or I need more info to understand it). I don’t read unless it really catches my interest. This is nothing new. Newspapers have been dealing with this since the dawn of printing.
What is new is that even those that are of interest or just entertainment, I definitely just skim the article to get the gist of it. I don’t read it comprehensively unless I find something particularly compelling while skimming.
Twitter - (threw that word in so you’ll quit skimming and start reading again) Getting back to the question from last week: is Twitter a fad or here to stay? The 140 character limit is definitely within the realm of “half of 111 words”. So, my gut says not here to stay, not per se, but it will change the way information is disseminated (already has).
Unfortunately for wordy folks like me, the days of long blog posts (like this one) may be behind us.
Who cares? Why do I bring this up? Aside from the Twitter discussion, the real question is how this will impact your writing, web design, content provided, and direct e-mail contact. Obviously, you’ll have to put much more thought into the 140 characters you share (if you read any of Palin’s Twitter posts you’ll understand the importance of having a good writer).
If Twitter (and facebook) hasn’t already impacted your writing/design style, it probably should (unfortunately), even if you don’t use either for business already.
Photo credit: flickr user sgrace
