My latest word sculpture was sinking like a stone. People were arriving at my story, but only 30% were finishing it. In the poetic words of Mark Limon:

TL;DR is internet speak for “Too Long, Didn’t Read.” It means that you failed at your primary job as a writer. You didn’t keep your audience engaged.

You can cry, or you can learn. If you can understand why they left, you can learn how to keep them around next time.

Let’s daydream for a sec. Say you’re giving a TED talk. Everybody has this daydream right? OK. So you start talking. By the time you finish, two thirds of your audience is gone.

Yep, you blew it. But you probably learned something too. You saw when people started leaving the room. You know what you said so far, or haven’t said. You valiantly declare never to use the word “thusly” again.

What’s missing for writers is a feedback loop. It’s always been this way. But Medium can change that. And all it takes is a skinny, green line.

Authors would see this line on the right side of each post. It tells you the percentage of people that reached this spot and lingered long enough to read.

Green = 75% or more
Red = 25% or less
Yellow = Everything in-between

The goal is a thin green line going the whole way down your story. Where it isn’t green, you can keep tweaking until it is.

Guessing Game

Right now, all we have is our gut. Mine tells me it’s the phrase “afforded by” pictured above, which leads people to think:

Who the hell does this guy think he is?

Or worse…

Booooorrrring!

As I penned these words, I knew they could get me into trouble. But I decided to be a rebel and do it anyway. And even now, I can’t bring myself to change them. Not without good hard data.

Message versus the Medium

There’s another possibility. My previous long posts averaged a 75% read-thru. This one: 30%. That’s a big difference.

And I did do something differently this time. I made heavy use of Medium’s new full-page images. I love them.

While it made my story more visually interesting, it’s possible this threw some people off. Maybe they didn’t know that if they scrolled past the giant image, more text would start to appear. Maybe they thought the story was already over.

Maybe they lost the flow of the text while they soaked in the image, and all the different thoughts it conjured up.

Does this hypothesis hold any weight? In the case of one reader, it did.

That’s one data point. Is this why I’m losing the majority of my audience? The trick is, I just don’t know.

But if I had the thin green line, I would.