|
过去人们曾说，没有人会真正地在手机上读到任何实质性内容。回顾过往，手捧着一本笨重庞大，墨水打印的纸质书来阅读，真是再正常不过了，反倒是用移动设备的屏幕来阅读显得太小了，坦率地说，看起来还有些荒唐。 My, how the tables have turned. 天呐，现在简直是局势大反转。 People are reading on their smartphones, and they are reading a lot. A new Pew study finds high levels of engagement among readers of longer news articles—those that run at least 1,000 words long, by Pew’s definition. (For context, this story clocks in around 600 words long.) 人们现在用智能手机阅读，而且还会大量阅读。皮尤研究中心（Pew）一项新研究表明，阅读长篇新闻的读者中有相当一部分人是重度阅读者。依皮尤的定义，长篇文章的字数应不少于1000。（本文字数约为600左右） Researchers assessed anonymized data reflecting the behaviors of readers who interacted with nearly 75,000 articles across 30 news websites in September 2015, using metrics provided by the analytics firm Parse.ly. Which means Pew’s findings don’t reflect reader behavior across the entire web; though researchers did get a decent bit of variety—including online-only sites, legacy news sites, niche news sites, general news sites, and so on. They also looked at articles from several categories of coverage: entertainment, science, technology, politics, business, sports, crime, and so on. 2015年9月，研究人员采用了分析公司Parse.ly.提供的度量标准，评估了匿名数据，该数据反映了30个新闻网站近75000篇文章的读者浏览行为。这意味着皮尤的调查结果无法反映出整个网络上的读者行为，虽然他们的研究人员在数据多样性上确实做了些努力，来源包括在线网站、传统新闻网站、小众新闻网站以及大众新闻网站等。同时，他们还从几个报道类别看文章，如娱乐、科学、技术、政治、商业、体育和犯罪。 All in all, they found cellphone users spend more time on average with longer articles. Which, at first blush, makes intuitive sense. Longer articles are, well, longer. So, sure, people take a longer to read them. But the larger takeaway is that not only are people are reading the news on their phones, they’re more engaged with longer articles. Pew found an average of 123 seconds of interaction time (scrolling, clicking, and presumably reading) for stories longer than 1,000 words compared with 57 seconds for stories shorter than 1,000 words. (Which, okay, even two minutes isn’t a very long time, but we’re talking averages here, and averages include the people who click then immediately stop reading.) “Readers spend about twice the time with long-form news content on their cellphones as with short-form,” Pew said. 总而言之，他们发现手机用户阅读长篇文章的平均用时较多。乍看之下，以为这只是是直观认识。长篇文章都相当长，因此，人们会花更多时间进行阅读，这点毋庸置疑。但更为重要的是，人们不仅仅在手机上阅读新闻，而且他们更多地阅读长篇文章。皮尤发现，阅读一篇字数超过1000的长文，整个交互过程包括滚动、点击和大致浏览平均用时为123秒，而阅读字数少于1000字的短文只需57秒。（这都无关紧要，两分钟并不是一个很长的时间，我们这里所讨论是平均情况，其中还包括有些人点击页面后立即停止阅读的情况。）皮尤表明，读者们在手机上阅读长文的时长是短文的两倍。 Relatedly, Pew found engaged time steadily goes up along with word count. Stories under 250 words garner an average of 43 seconds of engagement time; whereas stories that exceed 5,000 words draw people in for a whopping 270 seconds—or four-and-a-half minutes. 此外，皮尤还发现，阅读时间随文章字数增加而稳步上升。250字数以下的文章平均需要43秒的阅读时间，然而超过5000字的文章会花费足足270秒，即4.5分钟。 These findings become more interesting still when you consider the sea of articles people are choosing from. The vast majority are quite short, and yet people still choose to spend their time in more immersive stories. “Fully 76 percent of the articles studied were less than 1,000 words in length,” Pew wrote. “But, article for article, long-form stories attract visitors at nearly the same rate as short-form.” 你若考虑到人们那浩如烟海般的阅读选择，这些研究结果就显得更加有趣。绝大多数文章是相当短的，然而仍有人选择科幻小说。皮尤写道：“研究中，有76％的文章字数少于1000字，但是，如果不同长度文章之间比较的话，长篇文章与短篇文章对于阅读者的吸引力还是旗鼓相当的。 Three other interesting nuggets from the Pew study worth mentioning: First, cellphone readers tend to be early birds and night owls, doing most of their reading between 4 a.m. and 9:59 a.m., or between midnight at 3:59 a.m. Second, even though social media is a huge driver of traffic to articles of all lengths, accounting for about 40 percent of cellphone visits to new sites, people who reach news stories through portals like Facebook and Twitter arelesslikely to spend long periods of time engaged with those stories. And third, cellphone readers seem to be appreciating the Internet-content buffet for what it is. “An overwhelming majority of both long-form readers (72 percent) and short-form readers (79 percent) view just one article on a given site over the course of a month on their cellphone,” Pew said. 在皮尤研究中，另有三点相当有趣，值得一提：第一，手机阅读者往往是早起鸟与夜猫子，他们通常在凌晨4：00至9:00之间或半夜12:00至凌晨3：59之间阅读；第二，即使社交媒体为各种长度文章提供非常巨大的流量入口，占据手机访问新网页总量的40％，但是那些通过脸书与推特等平台阅读新文章的读者不太可能在该类文章上耗费很长时间。第三，手机阅读者似乎喜欢依据自身的阅读喜好在网络上搜寻读物。皮尤说：“在一个月之内，绝大多数的长文读者（72％）与短文读者（79％）在各自手机上阅读时，是在某个固定的网址上只阅读一篇文章。” The bottom line is this: Cellphones aren’t dissuading people from reading longer news stories. “Instead, the average user tends to stay engaged past the point of where short-form reading would end,” Amy Mitchell, Pew Research Center’s director of journalism research, said in a statement about the research, “suggesting that readers may be willing to commit more time to a longer piece of work.” 最重要的是，手机并不会拦阻人们阅读长篇新闻。皮尤研究中心（Pew Research Center）新闻学研究主任埃米·米切尔（Amy Mitchell）在关于研究报告中说：“恰恰相反，一般用户即使短篇文章阅读结束后，仍会继续阅读，这意味着读者可能更愿意花时间阅读长篇文章。”
英文来源：大西洋月刊 |
|
|
