When readers chose to read an online story, they usually read an average of 77% of the story, compared to 62% in broadsheets and 57% in tabloids.
In addition, nearly two-thirds of online readers read all of the text of a particular story once they began to read it, the survey revealed. In print, 68% of tabloid readers continued reading a specific story through the jump to another page, while 59% did so in broadsheet reading.
Frankly, this flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that online readers skim and don't read, and that they are constantly itching to jump to a new site. After all, the entire Internet is just a click away when you're reading online, and many of us content creators and packagers spend a lot of time working to offer readers contextual links to other content even as they're reading something else.
I have a couple theories on what might be going on here:
1. Because there are so many choices online, readers are more invested in the stories they actually select to read.
2. It can often be a pain to find the jump page in print. Instead, readers might choose to start another story on the original page.
3. In print, stories compete with much larger and often more colorful ads. By comparison, much less screen real estate is devoted to ads. That adds up to less distraction.
The reality, though, is that I don't really know why this happens. I'd love to hear some online usability experts weigh in on this issue.
Jakob Nielsen, are you listening?
I'm betting on something like #2. If you look at the sites tested, they're typical newspaper layouts--lots of stories on the main page with a 1- or 2-sentence teaser/summary for each, at best. The front page of a print newspaper has 3 to 5 stories with several paragraphs of each. Given the pyramid structure in newspaper editing, it's easy to read what's on the front page and feel like you got the gist of the story, so you move over to the next one. Online, in order to get even the gist, you pretty much have to click on the story, and then there you are with the whole thing in front of you.
ReplyDeleteBut there's still something to the conventional wisdom about skimming--from the report, "About 75 percent of print readers are methodical. Online readers are different: half are methodical while the other half are scanners." I don't see any comparison of comprehension rates between the two.