How do we know that short stories do better online?

How do we know that short stories do better online? Short answer: we don’t, but we could know because we can correlate page views, unique visitors, and time on page with word count.

2 Comments

Max November 29, 2010 Reply

I’m a bit skeptical of such claims, especially when all the evidence is anecdotal.

If I had to guess an explanation for the claim, I would suggest that the reason is that there’s a higher variance on quality of short stories versus longer stories. Though that also assumes that higher quality leads to higher pageviews, which may not be a valid claim either.

Daniel Bachhuber November 29, 2010 Reply

Good points. The first research question should be: given a random sampling of topics, do longer stories lead to a greater number of pageviews (or insert your preferred engagement metric here)? After you answer the question, you could then start speculating on the why.

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