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The ideal length for everything on the Internet

I’m often overwhelmed by yet another measurement of one social channel or another but this extract from a recent Buffer article caught my eye.

The ideal length of a blog post is 7 minutes, 1,600 words

When measuring the content that performs best on their site, Medium focuses not on clicks but on attention. How long do readers stick with an article?

In this sense, an ideal blog post would be one that people read. And Medium’s research on this front says that the ideal blog post is seven minutes long.”

Importantly they dicsuss about measuring attention or the time someone has spent on a particular page. Generally more time spent on a site or page is a good thing but on some pages you might not want people to linger so long, such as checkout pages, either way I find it a more human metric of what people find interesting rather than shares or clicks.

(As a follow on I also found this article on the Verge interesting about how many people may share an article but do they read it?)

Sadly our blog readers only reach an average of 1 and a half minutes, too short?


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