We’re all creating content and we all want to know if it’s being read, so how can we work that out?
Medium, who really do seem to be the innovators in the online publishing space, display a “reading time” metric at the top of every article, which is a very useful number for working out whether your work is being read.
If you publish your work on Medium, you get access to information on the number of people who viewed an article and, crucially, the number of people who have read it. But what if you don’t solely publish on Medium?
Well, helpfully, Medium’s Nick Fisher recently wrote an article explaining how Medium calculate their reading time metric, so with some simple spread sheet work and a little time spent within your analytics data, you too can work out if your blogposts are being read (or get a good idea at the very least).
Nick’s explanation about how Medium calculate reading time is clear and thorough, so I’m not going to try and re-write here, but what I have done is create Excel and Google Drive formulas which let you enter the total number of words an article has and the number of images it contains (up to a maximum of 10), it then returns a reading time metric measured in minutes and seconds.
The Google Drive sheet is saved here. Please do feel free to use it, share it or pick it apart.
If you’d like the Excel version or you’d like to learn more about how I constructed the formula, just drop me an email.
Two caveats I’d like to throw in are:
- As Medium have made clear, this metric is an approximation, it’s not definitive.
- Google Analytics, due to its terms of service, will not provide you with data on individual visits, so for each article you’ll only get the average time spent on page. This still lets you use reading time to judge whether, on balance, people who viewed an article broadly read it.