Those fretting over the effect that small screens have on big news stories may be able to breathe a little easier. A new survey from the Pew Research Center shows, somewhat surprisingly, that those reading on mobile devices actually spend more time with longer articles on their phones than they do with shorter ones.
Bite-size news and news digests seem ideal for smartphone screens. But people reading on smartphones tend to spend more time engaged with stories longer than 1,000 words than they do with shorter stories, according to the study done with the audience and data analysis firm Parse.ly. (A thousand words is about 30 inches of newspaper columns. For reference, this story is about 515 words long.) Long stories also get roughly the same number of visitors as short stories.
According to the study, people spend about twice as long scrolling, clicking and tapping on stories of 1,000 words or longer — 123 seconds as compared with 57.1 seconds for shorter stories of between 101 and 999 words. Not only that, the time spent actively reading an article grows incrementally with the length of the article.
"These findings suggest that on small, phone-sized screens the public does not automatically turn away from an article at a certain point in time — or reject digging into a longer-length news article," Amy Mitchell, Pew Research Center's director of journalism research, said in a statement. "Instead, the average user tends to stay engaged past the point of where short-form reading would end, suggesting that readers may be willing to commit more time to a longer piece of work."
The study doesn't address the effect of recent programs such as Facebook Instant Articles, which host content within the social network. It looks at only articles hosted on news sites. It also doesn't examine whether articles contained videos or graphics. Researchers said that while the study isn't fully representative of all media, they did take pains to look at a variety of types of news websites; 30 publications, described as "U.S.-based, non-local sites that produce original political or general interest news content." The study's dataset included 74,840 articles accessed by at least 71 million visitors.
