Posted by Raphael on Jul 27, 2010 in How To, My Business Adventures, Webdesign | 0 comments

Stumbled across a tweet that led me to this older study “How Little Do Users Read?” (via Jakob Neilsen’s Alertbox)

Apparently, not very much. In summary, (even though this article is 3 years old) people were already only reading at most 28% of your words on an average visit, spending maybe 4.4 seconds on each 100 words. I’d wager a guess that maybe now, 3 years later, these numbers have dropped…viewers spending even less time dwelling on your site and absorbing even less content.

My own site visitation numbers seem to correlate that finding. I think I average about over 8k visitors per month (where are you?), but a good portion of that traffic dwells here less than 4 seconds. They probably see what terrible writing I have and leave faster than they can hit the back button.

Anyway, it’s good to keep that article to support me when I’ve been urging clients to trim content into bite-sized chunks as much as possible.