Writing content for the web is not about meeting a word count. As that study DCrux linked to – and other evidence in this thread – suggests, the online readership is continually maturing in terms of the way it uses the medium to gain information.
I agree, users are a moving target.
It wasn’t too long ago the iron rule for justifying short text was users don’t want to scroll. While it is still important to have your important points first, testing reveals this behavior changed over time as users matured in their use of the web.
Human nature doesn’t change nearly as quickly as technology, but how users interact with the web is maturing. That implies you’re going to want to question basic assumptions every so often.
I write my articles to be 350-500 words it gets there attention with a good headline
then a brief statement then follow up then close with a action plan for them so they receive information from the article
I’ve seen some amazing C program in 50 characters or less. One of the more creative ICCC winners was 0 bytes in length. You wouldn’t guess what a 0-byte C program could do. (but you could google it)
The point was that size doesn’t matter. Another non-web example would be Pink Floyd’s “Vera”. One of the most touching songs I’ve ever heard. ~15 words. As soon as I see a web-based example I’d post back.
I usually advise about 500-700 words, but it all depends on your target audience, and it’s better to have a shorter article without any filler, keep it sticky, than 500 words, when your article could have been 300 words and higher quality.
I think this is pretty much what everyone else is saying!
It all depends on the subject. If it were something like auto quotes i would want the info to be brief yet informative. If it were time travel debate then i would want there to be alot of info to read and many informative opinions . It all depends on the subject matter and the reader. There is no set point of length.
There is no magic number, but as you can see somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 words is a good legnth.
However, should your article require a greater length, to get the point across, I would suggest breaking it up into multiple parts. This does a few things. 1) It gives your publisher not just one work, but rather, 3, 4 or however many parts you might have. 2) It breaks up your article into more palatable chunks, which is especially helpful for busy managerial types. 3) For those same managerial types it improves your chances of having your entire article read and 4) exposes you and your by-line to the reader more than once!
Length of an article depends on it’s purpose. The point you want to get across, the audience, whether you want to sell something with it or not.
And also your writing style and the media it gets published in. Articles in books or the better magazines can be quite long. But you know people are going to read them, the readers of the magazine are interested in the subject anyway. Plus they’re used to the format and the length of those articles.
People on the web are just like that. Some are used (by the sites they visit) to read long articles. A lot of people here don’t read much more then 500 words.
Know your audience and all other variables. Then write your article.
For the blog I write on patent law I decided to write longer pieces for the most part. There are a lot of patent blogs out there that are very short. What I find is that they do not have a lot of analysis and just report facts. That is good, but I wanted to do things differently.
So the answer to the question about how long really depends, in my opinion, on what it is you want to accomplish. I wanted to provide value added, which requires analysis. When I write about a case I want my article to be a substitute for reading the case, to the greatest extent possible.
It just depends upon how much contents you do have for writing. If the article is big, seprate it into paragraph and heading. The people who dont want to read big article, just read the topics they like in paragraph. Any artile could be good. if it has good presentation
400 or 500 words seems to short. I wrapped up an article for a magazine last week and had to take it down from 1,700 to 1,000. Admittedly, the article didn’t loose too much value with the reduction - but I felt that it could have been much better at around 2,000 - 2,500 words.
I suppose though, with print, you have a captive audience in some respects. The attention span of someone reading a magazine is probably a little bit longer than someone reading a blog post.
Not to sound like a broken record - but I think it was iterated very well by a few members here. Content should be good enough to capture the reader’s attention and keep them interested. If a well written article is broken into multiple pages, then all the better (even boost the pageview count with enough traffic).
Personally, I feel that 500-1000 words is generally within the range, however, I have to say that is more of a loose guideline rather than a rule.
It depends on your writing style too. If you create ngaginga nad esay to read articles, People will normally follow through. I have seen very helpful and informative articles that ranged from 350-500.
Maybe you could do a short version and a full version, the smaller linking the full one.
for articles for distribution. Most people, rummaging through articles need and want quick and relevant information.