Pew Research Center, in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, wanted to explore how the rise in mobile devices impacted long-form content. Using anonymized data from Parse.ly’s database of hundreds of news and media sites, it was able to analyze this trend.
We learned that long-form journalism does have a place in today’s mobile-centric society, including:
- Long-form stories attract visitors at nearly the same rate as short-form stories.
- Across all five distinct parts of the day, readers spend about twice the time with long-form news content on their cellphones as with short-form.
- No matter how readers arrive at specific content (through a link from an external website, social media, search, etc.), engaged time for long-form content regularly extends beyond that of short-form content.