The long and short of what magazine content
works online
Go figure...
The managing editor of Time.com, Josh Tyrangiel, says in a web interview:
The managing editor of Time.com, Josh Tyrangiel, says in a web interview:
- long form Time journalism is just not working online because it is...too long and
- 95% of what Time.com carries is created exclusively for the web
Labels: online
posted by D. B. Scott at
12:09 pm
4 Comments:
But do people actually read the entire articles online? Often I click on links that lead to what might be great pieces, but frankly, if I have to click to get to pages 2, 3, 4, 5, etc., I lose interest.
Don't get me wrong. I love long-form journalism. I just prefer to read it in print.
Like Anonymous, I rarely stick with a long-form article online. But if I know that the Sunday Times has a must-read magazine piece that promises to be substantial, I'll go out and buy a hard copy--as I did last weekend for the special issue on women. It's brilliant of the Times to post the Sunday magazine's content well ahead. I'm sure this tactic pushes a segment of the online readership back to the newsstand.
I read most of last week's Times Magazine on my iPhone, in fact, using the NYT iPhone app. It's portable and it saves my place in the article.
Anonymous, web analytics will tell us how long people spent on a page, so I know if people are leaving a long article after 30 seconds or 5 minutes. Unfortunately revenue doesn't increase (directly, at least) based on time spent on site so a lot of us are forced to try and get more pageviews to boost ad impressions. I know it kind of sucks, but hey, you're getting great content for free, right? That being said, personally I always try to make the clicks meaningful - either to present relevant images or to break up very, very long articles (you flip pages in a magazine, after all, and are presumably used to some of those pages being ads).
I actually don't mind paying for content. I'm a writer. I expect to pay and be paid for content.
I also have a terrible habit of keeping browser windows open for ages, so I'm probably throwing off your stats :-)
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