Reading longform on phones

Jan 21, 2014 - The Atlantic - Sit Back, Relax, and Read That Long Story—on Your Phone

Interesting data about users reading long articles on phones.

More than 50 percent of Buzzfeed's traffic comes from mobile visits. And that includes stories that are thousands of words long.

Earlier this month, Buzzfeed published a piece called Why I Bought a House in Detroit for $500. The story ended up getting more than a million pageviews, which is notable because it is also more than 6,000 words long. The other notable thing: 47 percent of those views came from people accessing the story on mobile devices. And while people who read the piece on tablets spent an average of more than 12 minutes with the story, those doing so on phones spent more than 25 minutes—a small eternity, in Internet time.

Those stats are, if not counterintuitive, then counter-conventional: The working assumption, among media executives and most of the public who cares about such things, has long been that phones are best suited for quick-hit stories and tweets rather than immersive, longform reads. And while content producers have attempted to take advantage of the "lean-back" capabilities of the tablet (see, for example, tablet-optimized products like The Atavist), phone use has generally been seen as flitting and fleeting—the stuff of grocery store lines and bus rides.

The second screen, in other words, is quickly gaining primacy in our lives—and for immersive content as well as quick-hit stuff.

So what's the appeal? Part of it, too, is the way phones in particular are structured: That single, tab-less screen—the screen that scrolls with the flick of a finger—fits the way we most like to read.

"The immersive scroll is the oldest of mediums," Buzzfeed's editor-in-chief, Ben Smith, points out. He's joking, but he's also sort of not: There's something intuitive about the scroll as an interface. One of Buzzfeed's most significant contributions to The Way We Web Now will likely prove to be the selection of a scroll framework over a paginated one.

The popularity of longform stories—of magazine stories—is telling as, among other things, a data point. "People's intuitions about longform were wrong," Peretti puts it. "They thought, 'Oh, the Internet is about the shortest possible clips, and no one has attention spans.'" But it's hard to impugn attention spans, he says, when "we see people spending 25 minutes on their phone, reading the story."

#media - #writing - #longform - #mobile