Conversely, the last blog post we wrote was 8,000+ words and took months of testing, yet the average 'read' time is under 2 minutes. I'm convinced there's a correlation between interested technical users and the blocking of analytics scripts - but if I were to naively look at the data, I'd also come to the conclusion that "lower effort" was better return on investment. I wonder if these tech journalism establishments are following their analytics and A/B testing themselves into oblivion.
It's like meat and potatoes, though. Yes you can fill a website up with low effort filler content that keeps your viewers engaged and visiting, but in the long run you also need some solid meaty stuff.
A lot of that sorta stuff moved over to youtube because it was easier to monetize. I think a hybrid of the two is the nicest (reading charts from youtube videos sucks)
It's a weird trap. With no analytics, it'd be difficult to attribute any conversions to a particular user type, so I'd wager that, if the hypothesis that lower tech users don't block ads/analytics holds up, the metrics skew that way. We can't make any realistic assertions without the data for that user group. Shrug.
