Ever notice how the most interesting articles online seem to command too much of your time? Have you ever stopped reading a long article online because you saw that it was paginated into 8 clicks? ‘Ugh, 8? That’s just too much,’ you might have thought.
If you’re anything like me, this happens to you all the time.
THE PROBLEM WITH LONG FORM ARTICLES ONLINE
Most of us read longer articles when we don’t have time to do so. For example, a friend might send you an email with a link to a really excellent piece, and you visit the link.
‘Huh, that IS interesting,” you might think. Then you may bookmark it to your delicious.com account or your browser or just file your email into a “To Read” folder.
Let me ask you this, how often do you go back and read those articles in their entirety? My guess is not often – again, that is if you are like me.
Despite my level of interest in a piece, I rarely, if ever, re-visit a long article online. I just don’t have the time. Long, in-depth articles are too overwhelming for me to read. Really.
THE REAL PROBLEM WITH LONG ARTICLES ONLINE
Long articles are usually the most researched and most interesting pieces you’ll find. The New York Times and magazines like Vanity Fair do a great job producing them. If you can make it through the whole read, you’re likely to come away satisfied. But most of us don’t.
And that’s not the biggest problem. The big problem is people like me will visit the long article, skim a little bit, look for pictures, captions, subheads and an easy summary to get the jist of the article, then we’ll leave. We likely won’t click any of the 8 paginaged pages of the article.
And that means you won’t get all the page views you could get if you approached long form articles differently.
This excellent long form article may pull in a lot of unique visitors, but it’s page views that pay the bills (that get advertisers happy).
The answer is more simple than you expect, and it’s not “add more social bookmarking buttons.”
CAN PRINT LEARN FROM TV?
Before I give you the answer, think for a moment what are the most popular types of TV shows right now. If you guessed series, you’d be right.
Think of how many people huddle around their TV each week to see the next installment of ‘24′ or ‘American Idol’. What about all the money producers have recouped by selling DVD box sets of TV show seasons?
Why does this work? Because longer content is broken up into episodes.
Sure, some people will sit on their couch for a full weekend and watch all of season 1 of ‘Heroes’. But more are likely to catch the show each week.
Now, let’s translate this to print, physical or online.
HOW TO GET THE MOST OUT OF YOUR LONG IN-DEPTH ARTICLES ONLINE
Long articles usually aren’t time-sensitive. In fact, they’re often stories that could be released at just about any time, especially when it comes to some magazines.
Ever noticed that? A truly interesting article can come about at any time. And what print often doesn’t have that TV does is the ability to promo good content for days, weeks or even months in advance. If you’re printing a big story, and you haven’t told anyone about it, how do you expect people to notice it? Are you relying on social networks to share your stories and give you viral traffic?
Forget it. You want to keep readers interests?
Don’t cut down the stories, break them up.
Print a little bit each day. Give readers one page to read and a cliff hanger, then tell them to come back tomorrow for the rest of the story. And if you have an 8-click in-depth article, let readers know you will have an installment coming each day for the next 8 days.
It’s more likely that over the course of those 8 days, you will get more page views, and even page views of previous days’ articles, than you would if you just tossed the whole darn mess up in a single swoop. And that’s what you want. More page views = more selling power = more ads = more money = staying open.
Want to know what spurred this post? Check out this excellent piece from Vanity Fair about the slipping of the NY Times from the top down. If you can read through more than a couple of the paginated pages, you are a more dedicated reader than me – and most others.
I REALIZE MY FOLLY
This post is already bordering on too long. So I’ll cut it here. What do you think?
btw, excellent bunny image by tm_lv
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By this reasoning, we all should have watched “Star Wars” in 10-minute chunks over a series of 12 separate viewings. Which would have sucked — the biggest benefit a movie has is the power to tell an entire story at one sitting, which inherently demands enough attention from the viewer to watch the whole thing.
I do agree, however, that pagination is not the answer; I’m personally just as apt to quit reading on paginated page 4 than I would be midway down a long single-page piece. I think the main problem is that some people just don’t have the attention span for long-form, and frankly never will, and that’s fine; but that doesn’t mean long-form should go away, or get chopped up and compromised to fit the needs of advertisers.
For a site that does the occasional long-form piece, I would suggest they simply mix up the long-form stuff with shorter pieces that will appeal more to the ‘quick hit’ ADD twitter fan. This site, for example, does a good job of that. Long 5,000 word pieces mixed in with photo essays and three paragraph quick hits.
I think it has alot to do with the expectation. People don’t expect to read the print version of a “Star Wars” in one sitting…the do expect to read a complete article/story online in one sitting.
I do agree with mixing things up however.
I still side that most people don’t have the time to read long articles online. But they do have the chance to read shorter, one-pagers. By breaking it up, you can build anticipation and greater stickiness for the overall story. Plus, breaking long articles into multiple posts over the course of several days aids SEO, which helps the site generate traffic through search engines.
The argument for posting a single long story all in one shot don’t outweigh the benefits of stretching the story out, imo. That’s just the way it’s always been done and I think people are hesitant to change. Although, now there are actual measurable results that support the change.
all that said, mixing it might be best. Not every 2-clicker article needs to be broken up into a series, but if an article goes beyond 2,000 words, I’d lobby for breaking it up into a series.
While we can agree to disagree about the excellence of the Vanity Fair piece, I think you are absolutely 100 percent right.
I would even go further and say we need to pull anything and everything we can from a longer piece if it works better as an online infographic, interactive or some kind of multimedia.
We who bleed ink may not like it, but I think if we simply paid attention to our own browsing habits we’d see that it’s really not a debatable point.
If you look at stats for sites that specialize in online paginated articles, readers tend not to click through when a long piece is broken up into 4-8 parts. They simply don’t. There’s a sharp drop-off after page 2, a sharper drop off after page 3, and then an exponential drop-off after that.
I posit that the people who don’t read long articles would *never* read long articles even if they were broken up. They simply don’t have the attention span or the sustained interest. Don’t kill the bunny chasing a hypothetical reader who simply doesn’t exist.
Ha! You beat me to it. I was going to comment that even this article was getting a bit long… but a good topic. Thank you.
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Not sure about breaking it up on line, unless it’s Dickens. That worked before, should work again.
On the other hand, how about making the long article available as an ebook to the Kindle. It’s a great reading machine. There is a saying by Frank Romano, the king of print commentators, that the real advantage of the book are the 3 B – the bathroom, the bedroom and the beach. The Kindle gets an A on the 3 Bs.
Or how about doing a print on demand paperback. And sell it from the website for $4. The paperback is still the best reading appliance on the planet.
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