A 5-Minute Read About The X-Minute Read and Longform Writing
Read times for articles are becoming more common. What do read times tell us about our attention spans and what does it mean for longform writing?
When I first started writing on Medium, back in Summer 2016, I remembered one of the things about Medium as a platform that fascinated me was the Read Time feature. Along with the headline, by-line, and publishing date for each article was a little note indicating how long it would take to read a given article. This was a number that, according to Medium, was based on the “average reading speed of an adult (roughly 265 WPM) […] with an adjustment made for images”, and back then, there appeared to be somewhat of an agreement among the community of Medium writers that the magic number for writers was 3-minutes.
That seemed to align with the “technology is killing our attention spans” sentiment, as well as the evidence on Medium, where posts that were doing well all seemed to be 3 or 4, occasionally 5, minute reads. Fast-forward to present day, and over half of the articles featured on Medium’s homepage and the “Popular on Medium” list regularly have read times of 5 or more minutes. My own experience from the creator side of the equation also reflects this. Even as little as a year ago, the 3-minute or 4-minute reads that I wrote generally did much better than the occasional 5-minute or 7-minute piece, whereas my posts now are all 5-minute reads or longer, my most successful piece is a 14-minute read, and engagement is better across the board.
There appears to be some kind of change occurring, and I think I know why.
It’s 2018, and if you’ve ever made something that you wanted people on the internet to see, you’ve probably realized that getting your work out there is not particularly difficult, whether your thing is non-fiction essay writing, DIY tutorial-making, or IRL live-streaming. No, the problem of the day for content creators is separating your work from the millions of other people also trying to get to where you want to get to by doing the same thing you’re doing.
As a reader or viewer, then, that means there are more voices vying for your attention than ever, and with so…
