How Are Online Platforms Able To Tell How Long It Takes To Read An Article?

I believe one of the reasons people are able to make time to watch a movie or video clips is because they know how long it'll take them to finish it. If people's attention span is as short as 8 seconds (which many sources claim it is). I doubt humans would able to appreciate art or do anything worthwhile. Seeing as the subject of attention span is relative, it is worth examining the issue of declining reading activity by humans. I frankly believe that a lot of people like to be able to account for their time in advance and would most likely pick activities that clearly state how much time would be required to complete them.

DECLARING ESTIMATED CONSUMPTION TIME ON DIGITAL CONTENT IS IMPACTFUL

This is where most books are found lacking. If I pick up a book at the store, I can't find any information about how long it'll take me to read the entire book. With video or audio content, it's right there and so easy to check. This is why a recent strategy that online media has adopted works like magic. A lot of platforms where content is posted regularly tend to display prominently the amount of time required to go through the written content posted and it has reaped massive dividends as people (who read) are reading a lot more now. The "how" of it is rather simple and I think Hashnode uses something similar.

A SIMPLE CALCULATION HELPS US KNOW THE READING TIME

The average person reads between 200 to 250 words per minute, software engineers simply write code that is able to count the number of words in an article and divide it by let's say 200 and they're able to tell you how long it'll take to read the content in minutes or divide again by 60 and they'll tell you in hours. While most of us think that machines can count words without being taught I'm here to shock you that we have to teach them. By convention, we usually write an algorithm that more or less tells the machine that a group of letters that aren't separated by whitespace is a word.

Any string of (joined) letters that are preceded by whitespace and end with whitespace is a word and that's it. By now you should have caught on with the fact that the time taken to read an article isn't accurate if there are pictures in them, other digital contents have durations that can be used to adjust the calculation but pictures can't exactly be without using some random figure like 5 seconds for it. All in all, the most important takeaway is how software engineering is able to make use of research into human behaviour and use that information to proffer solutions to some challenges that seem insignificant but have a huge impact on consumer behaviour. I would however like to see word counts and expected reading time prominently displayed on books going forward.