Ideal length of your blog post
A personal analysis of reading and writing a blog
What is the ideal length of a story where readers stick to it from beginning to end? Or is there an ideal time to measure or the content of the post?
Let’s discuss.
Few days back, I read somewhere that an average person spends maximum 6–7 min in reading a blog post or an article. Beyond that either the interest of the reader is lost, or the content is not good enough to get the readers glued.
With the fast changing life with an immense amount of information in digital platforms and continuous feeds in the social media platforms, it is almost difficult to expect a reader to read a long long article unless it is a very exciting and beneficial for him.
Time has changed. Gone are the days where people used to spend hours after hours in reading a single newspaper. If you compare with today’s time, how much time we spend really to read a newspaper? It is a considerable fact that today there is a free flow of information speeding from one corner of the world to another. The authenticity is also at stake. Competition is high on clickbait headline and not exactly the content inside. Basically the overall quality of news and information is compromised.
We all have 24 hours. So, as a reader, it is our responsibility to decide what to pick for reading and what is to be filtered. We have to restrict ourselves to participate in the “knowing all topics” game of the world. Before the start of the social media era, people used to visit the library, buy books, spend quality time on a particular topic, expand their knowledge on that topic discussing with their colleagues and peers. However, we have very less people left in our society who do all these exercises. Because we have to check our Facebook feed, WhatsApp/snap chat messages, Instagram feed, check each other’s photos, videos etc. We have no idea how much we are spending unnecessarily clicking on just everything. However, content in the streaming channels have also gone up which takes much of our time.
It is high time, we select our topics which interest us and from where we read and gain knowledge. As a writer, our responsibility is to make good content which is helpful, fun and informative for the readers. We all should be aware that the beautiful world of writing and reading needs to reset and gets it untouched by a few bogus social media feeds.
So, can we conclude that it is not about the length of the post but the content? Otherwise there will not be any record breaking selling of books. The content of the blog or article must be short and clear in communication and if more content to make it lengthy, then it must be really good and valuable content so that readers actually read through the entire piece.
According to survey data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics,Time spent reading for personal interest varied greatly by age. Individuals age 75 and over averaged 48 minutes of reading per day whereas individuals ages 15 to 54 read on average 10 minutes or less per day.
(Source: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm)
There is a nice story published in medium where writer Michael Simmons nicely explained how much time Bill Gates, Warren Buffett And Oprah spend in reading.
“Warren Buffett spends five to six hours per day reading five newspapers and 500 pages of corporate reports. Bill Gates reads 50 books per year. Mark Zuckerberg reads at least one book every two weeks. Elon Musk grew up reading two books a day, according to his brother.”
Here is the link of the story :
https://readmedium.com/bill-gates-warren-buffett-and-oprah-all-use-the-5-hour-rule-308f528b6363
I am not citing any graphs and figures from my own research but there are a couple of articles which has good information on how much decline is seen in quality reading.
At the end, I must say, it is a combo effort from both writer and reader to make good content for the community. Secondly, we must filter out the contents which are beneficial and meaningful for our life. Last but not the least, we must work on our concentration and attention so that we don’t get deviated from the focus of the reading.
I have tried to write my pieces short and meaningful for my readers and happy to know they are liking. You can go to my profile and check some of them.