Mobile news engagement research

The research set out to discover if the shift to mobile/small screen access to news was impacting the reading of long-form news articles.

Researchers measured the amount of time readers spent engaging with news articles of various lengths using data from 117 million anonymised mobile interactions provided by Parse.ly.

 Key findings include:

• consumers spend more time on average with long-form news articles than with short-form
• shorter news articles (less than 1000 words) make up 76% of the articles included in the study BUT long-form article attract visitors at nearly the same rate
• Mobile news users spend the most time reading long-form content when arriving via an internal link, and the least time when arriving via a social network.
• For news articles of any length, Twitter brings in people who spend more time with content while Facebook delivers more readers overall

Source: Digital Book World.   Read more about the research here.