Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Pew Research Center, in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, wanted to explore how the rise in mobile devices impacted long-form content. Using anonymized data from Parse.ly’s database of hundreds of news and media sites, it was able to analyze this trend.

Report Findings: People Read Long-Form Content On Phones
It turns out that long-form journalism does have a place in today’s mobile-centric society.

“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. 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,” said Amy Mitchell, Pew Research Center’s director of journalism research.

Some highlights of the report include:

• Long-form stories attract visitors at nearly the same rate as short-form stories.
• Across all five distinct parts of the day, readers spend about twice the time with long-form news content on their cellphones as with short-form.
• No matter how readers arrive at specific content (through a link from an external website, social media, search, etc.), engaged time for long-form content regularly extends beyond that of short-form content.

These findings hold true even for individual digital publishers. For example, Lehigh University, a member of Parse.ly’s University Partnerships program, recently completed a study on reader engagement with long-form content. Editors at Lehigh’s student newspaper, The Brown & White, found that readers spend about the same amount of time on all pieces of content, relative to the length of an article.