How much do we read online?

Jakob Nielsen's latest article, How Little Do Users Read? has some shocking conclusions!

About 20% of the text on your site!!!

Wow, that sounds extremely low to me, but it sounds like he did a good job analyzing the data.

What does this mean for us?

Well, I think Steve Krug's advice to cut your content in half and then cut it in half again seems to be pretty accurate.

In general, I think it's important to be ruthless about putting your pages on the chopping block and getting rid of all the excess fat (Nielsen calls it Blah-blah text).

Your pages should only contain the most important information. That's right. No Welcome! No corporate fluff. No thanks for visiting my site. Just tell people what the site is for and give context to the other pages in the site (or, as Jared Spool would say, give them more of a scent of information). Help lead your readers down the path they're looking for. Help them to find what they're looking for.