Consuming long form content
At a time where platforms are encouraging digestible short form content to capture the human attention span, Medium went the extra mile to introduce long form content. They even increased their bets by introducing a new engagement metric that’s Total Time Reading (TTR), drifting away from the industry standard metrics which are CTR, views, etc. Before diving deeper into the TTR, lets take a look at the different forms of content.
When looking at the difference between short form content versus long form content from a user standpoint, we find the following:
1- Short form caters to short attention span as people are digesting content on the go. Whether people are on their way to a meeting, on a lunch break or even walking to the train station, they pull out their mobile phone to grasp what they need to feed their content hunger. Users want to get their answers as quickly as possible within a short time frame.
2- Producing agile short form content is quicker than long form. It takes less time to publish a tweet that contains at most 240 characters than producing a whitepaper with at least 1,200 words. Therefore, it saves time and money for both; the company that’s producing the content and the user whose consuming it.
As for long form content, this mainly works for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to help with higher ranking on search results. A study that involved more than 20,000 keywords conducted by serpIQ, resulted in showing that the top 10 results on search engines were achieved with articles that were published with more than 2,000 words. Aside from SEO, Beth Carter found that users spend more than twice as much time with articles over 1,000 words than they do with shorter articles (Carter, 2019). This proves that long form content publishers such as Medium have an increased time spent on the website by the user/reader.
When looking at how Medium measures success, they Pitch Medium to publishers with a metric that they invented that is TTR. I agree that this kind of metric is allowing them to have a competitive advantage, distinguishing them amongst their competitors. However, what could also help them further support this metric is heat mapping.
Heat Maps are visual representations of data. They were developed by Cormac Kinney in the mid-1990s to try to allow traders to beat financial markets (Brikett. 2019). Two features that are available with heat maps can defiantly support the way Medium measures TTR which are: attention maps and scroll maps.
An attention map is a heat map that shows the website owners/developer which part of the landing page is viewed the most by the user who is browsing. This helps the website owner understand which areas of the page are being viewed the most and how far/long the user spends on the page. Attention maps are considered to be more useful than mouse-movement or click-based heat maps, as it gives the insights on whether crucial pieces of information such as text and visuals are visible to all users, making it easier to design pages with the user in mind.
On the other hand, scroll maps are heat maps that shows how far a user scrolled on the page. They show where the users drop off from the page that makes it reliable for Medium to understand how far the user read. This type of heat maps is best for long form content.
In conclusion, since Medium is a platform that relies heavily on readers who consume long form content, they need to ensure that their TTR metric is actually backed up by enough data when pitching it to advertisers, to ensure they main competitive advantage with a metric that distinguishes them from other platforms.
Bibliography
Birkett, Alex. “Heat Maps: What Are They Good For (Besides Looking Cool)?” CXL, 9 June 2019, cxl.com/blog/heat-maps/
Carter, Beth. “Do People Read Long-Form Content?” Clariant Creative Agency, LLC, 10 Feb. 2019, www.clariantcreative.com/blog/do-people-read-long-form-content.
Lincoln, John. The SEO And User Science Behind Long-Form Content, 28 Sept. 2015, searchengineland.com/seo-user-science-behind-long-form-content-230721.
MEDIUM IN 2017: DEVELOPING A NEW MODEL FOR MEDIA. (2017). 1–18.