How people read online: Why you won't finish this article. - 1 views
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For every 161 people who landed on this page, about 61 of you—38 percent—are already gone.
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We’re at the point in the page where you have to scroll to see more. Of the 100 of you who didn’t bounce, five are never going to scroll.
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You’re tweeting a link to this article already? You haven’t even read it yet! What if I go on to advocate something truly awful, like a constitutional amendment requiring that we all type two spaces after a period?
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Schwartz’s data shows that readers can’t stay focused. The more I type, the more of you tune out. And it’s not just me. It’s not just Slate. It’s everywhere online. When people land on a story, they very rarely make it all the way down the page. A lot of people don’t even make it halfway.
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Even more dispiriting is the relationship between scrolling and sharing. Schwartz’s data suggest that lots of people are tweeting out links to articles they haven’t fully read. If you see someone recommending a story online, you shouldn’t assume that he has read the thing he’s sharing.
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OK, we’re a few hundred words into the story now. According to the data, for every 100 readers who didn’t bounce up at the top, there are about 50 who’ve stuck around. Only one-half!
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Take a look at the following graph created by Schwartz, a histogram showing where people stopped scrolling in Slate articles.
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There’s a spike at 0 percent—i.e., the very top pixel on the page—because 5 percent of readers never scrolled deeper than that spot.
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Finally, the spike near the end is an anomaly caused by pages containing photos and videos—on those pages, people scroll through the whole page.)
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Or look at John Dickerson’s fantastic article about the IRS scandal or something. If you only scrolled halfway through that amazing piece, you would have read just the first four paragraphs. Now, trust me when I say that beyond those four paragraphs, John made some really good points about whatever it is his article is about, some strong points that—without spoiling it for you—you really have to read to believe. But of course you didn’t read it because you got that IM and then you had to look at a video and then the phone rang …
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Schwarz’s histogram for articles across lots of sites is in some ways more encouraging than the Slate data, but in other ways even sadder:
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On these sites, the median scroll depth is slightly greater—most people get to 60 percent of the article rather than the 50 percent they reach on Slate pages. On the other hand, on these pages a higher share of people—10 percent—never scroll. In general, though, the story across the Web is similar to the story at Slate: Few people are making it to the end, and a surprisingly large number aren’t giving articles any chance at all.
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Chartbeat can’t directly track when individual readers tweet out links, so it can’t definitively say that people are sharing stories before they’ve read the whole thing. But Chartbeat can look at the overall tweets to an article, and then compare that number to how many people scrolled through the article.
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Courtesy of Chartbeat And here’s a similar look at the relationship between scrolling and sharing across sites monitored by Chartbeat: Courtesy of Chartbeat
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There’s a very weak relationship between scroll depth and sharing. Both at Slate and across the Web, articles that get a lot of tweets don’t necessarily get read very deeply.
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Schwartz tells me that on a typical Slate page, only 25 percent of readers make it past the 1,600th pixel of the page, and we’re way beyond that now.
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Sure, like every other writer on the Web, I want my articles to be widely read, which means I want you to Like and Tweet and email this piece to everyone you know. But if you had any inkling of doing that, you’d have done it already. You’d probably have done it just after reading the headline and seeing the picture at the top. Nothing I say at this point matters at all.
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So, what the hey, here are a couple more graphs, after which I promise I’ll wrap things up for the handful of folks who are still left around here. (What losers you are! Don’t you have anything else to do?) This heatmap shows where readers spend most of their time on Slate pages:
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Schwartz told me I should be very pleased with Slate’s map, which shows that a lot of people are moved to spend a significant amount of their time below the initial scroll window of an article page.
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Since you usually have to scroll below the fold to see just about any part of an article, Slate’s below-the-fold engagement looks really great. But if articles started higher up on the page, it might not look as good. In other words: Ugh.
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Maybe this is just our cultural lot: We live in the age of skimming. I want to finish the whole thing, I really do. I wish you would, too. Really—stop quitting! But who am I kidding. I’m busy. You’re busy. There’s always something else to read, watch, play, or eat. OK, this is where I’d come up with some clever ending. But who cares? You certainly don’t. Let’s just go with this: Kicker TK.
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"Schwartz's data shows that readers can't stay focused. The more I type, the more of you tune out. And it's not just me. It's not just Slate. It's everywhere online. When people land on a story, they very rarely make it all the way down the page. A lot of people don't even make it halfway. Even more dispiriting is the relationship between scrolling and sharing. Schwartz's data suggest that lots of people are tweeting out links to articles they haven't fully read. If you see someone recommending a story online, you shouldn't assume that he has read the thing he's sharing."