Online readers more assiduous than print

Stephen Withers
Monday, 02 April 2007 12:43

Your IT - Home IT

A study carried out by the Poynter Institute found that people read more of an article online than they do from print.

On average, people read 77 percent of the story text online, compared with 62 percent for broadsheet newspapers and 57 percent for tabloids.

Furthermore, nearly two-thirds of online readers read the entire text of online stories once they had started.

Interestingly, it doesn't matter whether online readers work methodically through the text or scan it, they end up reading approximately the same volume of text.

The results come from EyeTrack07, an eye-tracking study of around 600 subjects. More detailed results will be disclosed later this month.

Given the limited results published so far, it's not easy to interpret the findings. I've long suspected that online readers pre-screen articles according to the headlines and introductions that appear on the site's front page and any other index/contents pages, and only begin reading articles that interest them.

Newspaper readers, on the other hand, probably work more or less sequentially through a newspaper, and begin to read many articles but bailing out after a paragraph or two if they don't find the story interesting. While this means they read on average a smaller proportion of each story they start, I  can't help wondering if they don't read a wider variety of material.
 
The St. Petersburg, Florida based Poynter Institute describes itself as "a school for journalists, future journalists, and teachers of journalists."