Sit Back, Relax, and Read That Long Story—on Your Phone

By: Megan Garber | The Atlantic

Earlier this month, Buzzfeed published a piece called "Why I Bought a House in Detroit for $500." The story ended up getting more than a million pageviews, which is notable because it is also more than 6,000 words long. The other notable thing: 47 percent of those views came from people accessing the story on mobile devices. And while people who read the piece on tablets spent an average of more than 12 minutes with the story, those doing so on phones  spent more than 25 minutes—a small eternity, in Internet time. 

Those stats are, if not counterintuitive, then counter-conventional: The working assumption, among media executives and most of the public who cares about such things, has long been that phones are best suited for quick-hit stories and tweets rather than immersive, longform reads. And while content producers have attempted to take advantage of the "lean-back" capabilities of the tablet (see, for example, tablet-optimized products like The Atavist), phone use has generally been seen as flitting and fleeting—the stuff of grocery store lines and bus rides. "The average mobile reader tends to skim through headlines and snackable content as opposed to diving into long-form articles," Mobile Marketer put it in late October.