Listen: Most People Don’t Read

Our online reading habits have changed drastically over the last decade. Ten years ago, more than half of web visitors identified as readers. Today, that number has been cut in half, to just twenty-eight percent.

A recent study tracked user behavior to see if we actually read what we claim to. It turns out, thirty seconds is the ultimate cliff. Within thirty seconds, two-thirds of visitors have already left the page.

There is also a major gap between what we say and what we do. Only half of the people who called themselves readers actually behaved like one. On the other hand, some self-proclaimed skimmers actually spent a meaningful amount of time with the content, perhaps downplaying their habits in a culture where quick scanning is now the norm.

Where visitors come from matters, too. People arriving from LinkedIn are three times more likely to read than those coming from Facebook.

Ultimately, scrolling is not the same as reading. Almost everyone scrolls to the bottom of a page, but very few actually digest the words. For content creators, this means the first twenty seconds are everything. To hook your audience, you must front-load your value and make your key points easy to scan.