Measure read time

Forget clicks, forget page loads, measure read time! We've been measuring read times extensively since launch in 2013 and it turns out we're in good company: Medium and Upworthy both recently acknowledged the intrinsic power of this metric.

Quotes sourced from: Because Reading is Fundamental | Coding Horror : programming and human factors. November 2014

The wonderful Jeff Atwood nails the important metric to judge social value. If you are not measuring social capital you should be. The listening point really resonated as well. You always have your best conversations with good listeners.

Agree that considering what behaviours you encourage in your digital communications is very important.

The Ars Tech Banana test looks good too. Could be a manifestation of Gestalt Theory in text.

These experiments demonstrate that we don't need to incentivize talking. There's far too much talking already. We badly need to incentivize listening.

And online, listening = reading.

Couldn't agree more. Jeff even has a few ideas about how you might do this. They are:

Remove interruptions to reading, primarily pagination. [i.e. don't be Wikipedia]

Think really carefully about adding links or save them up for a special section or at the end of your content.

Measure read times and display them.

I have noticed this on few sites most notably Medium and hadn't thought of it as a motivating factor... but I did feel positively influenced because the site had thought about my time and attention... and in the distraction engine of the web, attention to attention is key.

Give rewards for reading.

It might sound a bit naff but I know lots of projects involving image matching, manual correction of scanned text etc. that have leveraged a few gamification basics to get a lot user engagement and commitment to an activity. Worth a shot.

Update in real time.

If you can do it why not provide it.