How We Read Web Content

Study reveals how we read web content.

People spend a lot of time liking, tweeting, sharing and generally promoting a wide range of online content. Content analysis often resides at the promotional level, and doesn't delve too deeply into how people interact with the material being promoted. This form of analysis holds significant value, since determining how much magnetism a page generates between itself and a viewer could influence return rates and engagement with  facets of that page which may be related to a marketing campaign.

Apparently we don't spend too much time per page. A Chartbeat study which analyzed 2 billion page visits found that 55% of people spent less than 15 seconds on a page. In addition, the study found that a third of visitors spent less than 15 seconds on an article page. Chartbeat also determined that maintaining a visitor's attention for 3 minutes makes them twice as likely to return than if their attention has only been held for a minute.

We also appear to not be fond of native ad content. In a standard article, on average, 2/3 of people engage for more than 15 seconds. When content contains native advertisement, engagement falls to one third. The same effect occurs with page scrolling. In regular content, 71% of people scroll down, whereas with native content, only 24% of people do.

Sources:

What You Think You Know About The Web Is Wrong. March 9 2014. Time Magazine.

Image - Readability on the iPad. Sebastien Wiertz.