ADD Nation, 90% of Social Media Referrals Don't Read

http://www.victusspiritus.com/2009/12/13/add-nation-90-of-social-media-referrals-dont-read/

by messel • 17 years ago

1 5 17 years ago

tokenadult• 17 years ago

"It was a startling realization, but all the amazing 'views' I get from sites like HackerNews, Reddit, Digg or StumbleUpon are 80-90% meaningless. Not only do very few of them revisit my site, but the vast majority of folks that find my blog posts from social sites leave in under 10seconds. That’s an obvious signal to me that they aren’t even reading the first paragraph. How can anyone really judge the value of an article in under 10 seconds without reading any of it? The obvious answer, they can’t."

I am very surprised that this is news to this blogger. Jakob Nielsen has been letting people know this for years,

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html

that people read very little on the Web,

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html

but maybe most people have never read those articles. Hm.

But to respond to the author of the submitted blog post, why SHOULD I read for more than ten seconds if the first ten seconds don't provide a rationale for reading further? I do read several articles a day in full length, but they had better be well written and informative, as there are millions of other Web postings out there competing for my attention and time.

theoneill• 17 years ago

"How can anyone really judge the value of an article in under 10 seconds without reading any of it? The obvious answer, they can’t."

I was curious about this so I clicked on the link. The actual answer is that you can tell a lot about a site in just a second or two. As soon as I saw the tag cloud, I was gone.

messel3• 17 years ago

Oh boy. I love the cloud, never realized how polarizing it is. Do you think most folks hate cumulus? Any idea why?

Or do you think the topics (inspiration, entrepreneurship, leadership, mind) are danger signals to readers?

By the way, thanks a bunch for saying something. Feedback on touchy issues is a big help to improving the site. Contrary to the stats I've collected so far, I really do want people to get a positive first impression from the blog.

messel3• 17 years ago

Tried to make the tag less repulsive to those that dislike it, and added a fixed cloud for functional ease of use.

messel3• 17 years ago

Thanks Karl, I do read plenty on and off the web but the wonderful news is, there's plenty more to learn.

Appreciate the links, will check them out.

edit Holy Crap! how did I miss reading this. I've been writing my blog for almost a year assuming folks read pages like myself. What a terrible assumption, no wonder only 15% are sticking around to read, that matches almost perfectly with the stats they mentioned:

"we found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word."

I'm just a little slower at reading, I can't judge as fast as the majority of readers here. If the title is appropriate enough to click, my first paragraph must be pretty terrible to be driving a large audience away. edit it turns out it's not web optimized

I judge a blog or site by the author's choice of topic, the readability of their font, and then their writing style (which I can only get a feel of after a few paragraphs).

I don't want to waste browser's attention, but I also don't yet understand the psychology of instant web judgement. For the greater part my blog is about ideas, and text is the content.

I'll have to review my web writing strategy. I may be writing for 16% of the browsing audience, and that may be ok.

Thanks again for pointing out what must be plainly obvious to you.

ADD Nation, 90% of Social Media Referrals Don't Read

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