There are many things on the web, and they include more contents people ever need. As more websites/blogs are publishing new posts, the more people aren't going to stay there for long. On the web, people rarely finish reading; in the current shareable web, people are not just that keen in reading.
The fact that people are not finishing what they started is becoming more true on the web. They browse websites, they visit pages through links, they see images, play videos, interact with features and many more. But they have to stop sometime, and they tend to finish without realizing what their sole and initial purpose was.
Writing on the web is aimed to get more audience and getting better engagement. You may have spent a lot of time to get an idea about a great attractive topic, and spend more time to write a compelling article for it. But people aren't reading them. Even if they do, they aren't finishing what they started.
Only a small number of web visitors are reading all the way through a web article. Webmasters and web owners should be aware of this. No matter how good your contents are written, no matter how much time you spent on checking the spelling and words, the percentage of visitors that actually care is small. Most people tend to jump to the end of the page to see what's what, what's the conclusion, what's the answer, the end. And if you have a comment box below, they may spend more time there than the actual article.
Unable To Stay Focus
As the web has so much to give, people are becoming more distracted. From the web design the site has, the navigation, the banners, ads, links, images, media contents and more. On the web, people can't stay focus on one thing for a long time before getting their minds occupied into something else.
The more a page has to say, the more people are tuned out. This happens not to just one or a few people, it happens to almost everyone on the web. Online, when people visits a page, they rarely read all the way down to the very bottom. In fact, making them go through half of the page is already an achievement.
This comes to the relationship between scrolling and sharing.
A research suggested that people tend to share things they like, even when they haven't fully read everything the page has to say. So if there's anything someone has shared on the web, you can assume that the person hasn't read the thing he/she shared.
Making people focus is a lot of work. Using heat maps is one of the way to see where on a page your readers are putting their most attention. Some of the things you can do to minimize distraction are: putting more relevant images/media, use white space whenever possible, use contrast colors for text-background, and limit ads as well as outbound links.
Going Through Length
A page that is informational should be long. There is no way you can describe something in details without having to go through every tiny bits of information. You can accompany the article with images and other media information just to make it compelling.
Any added information, whether it is text, images or anything else, add up to the length to the overall page. When your page is already long, making it longer won't make people necessarily read them. No matter how good the post is, seeing a long page they have to scroll is already overwhelming. And people can be overwhelmed even before reading the first few paragraphs.
People are in a hurry, and in the fast-paced digital world, there is less to nobody that wants to be bothered with a slow loading page, or reading a long articles that they have no idea who's the writer.
A typical web page is about 2000-3000 pixels long. According to the research, 5 percent of readers won't scroll at all, while most interested readers will stay to at least 50 percent mark. The more a reader has to scroll, the more percentage of them are distracted.
When length matters, you need to put everything in one place, and make them as compact as possible. You may have many things to say, but putting all those words inside a single page is not at all appealing. If your article really has to be that long, you may as well use pagination. This method will enable readers to see (predict) how long they have to stick around, without even scrolling too much. You can also put anchor points in several important parts of the page, and scatter as much of your "secondary" information to the rest of the page, just to make each paragraphs have something interesting to say.
Another method is to put all of the most necessary information, and feature, above the fold.
Social Sharing: The Annoying Fact
The relationship between scrolling and sharing is getting weaker as a page is made to share, or have the feature that made it shareable. Most web pages that contain articles or news, have social widgets. And this is becoming more common.
The relationship weakens because pages that got a lot of shares, don't necessarily get read very deeply. The same goes to the opposite: pages that do get read, don't usually generate that much shares.
As a writer, this can be an annoying fact. Things that make a page interesting to share is not just because of how well it's written. The possibility is that it can either have an outstanding topic, viral information that is currently hot, debatable data, or some other things.
Writers may have spent many of their time to create a story that is both interesting and influential, both technically and informative. But without the ability to put the best information up and be readable easy and fast, there's a reason to not write it at all.
We live in the age of skimming. Readers rarely finish what they started. Please the eyes first, then do the talking.