Mmmm… disagree. Depends what your subject matter is, but find yourself a passionate niche - be the subject matter football or, say, your kid’s education - and punters will read every spit dot and comma… that’s why we aim for 900-1,000 word pieces every time.

People want a good read; that’s why we’ve got an average visit time to MFW of seven minutes.

And you have to think commercially - 1,000-words allows us to spread that over two pages; two chunky 500-word pieces that allows one story to provide two page impressions and six, not three ad slots around it…

Again if advertising is moving ever more towards a time-based metric then the higher the ’stickability’ of the site - ie the longer the eyeballs are on the site, the more advertisers want their brand to be there…

As I say, it works when you’re servicing a passionate niche; may not be for everybody. But if your market is the 10.50am coffee break one, then people are drawn to the good, reliable, engaging reads… before the boss saunters back into the office and sees what’s on your PC.

Very true, but as you say 500 words work better. We found with ScribbleSheet that 500 word article gathered a lot more readers for a lot more time than 800 words. People were actually complaining 800 words were waaaaay too long.

Where can I pre-order.

Thanks for the link Paul.