Quite a bit has been written about reading habits on the web, but almost all of that relates to the experience of reading on the screen and the skimming and clicking that results from that. I'm not aware of any material that has been published on the question of reading habits over time.

Magazines seek subscriptions, and readers choose to subscribe to those magazines that cater to their interests and tastes. If we subscribe to a magazine for a year we periodically receive a copy of it in the mail and devote time to reading it. We develop a relationship with the magazine and look forward (monthly? weekly?) to the arrival of a new edition. But the web changes this as well. With such a vast amount of material available to us the amount of time we spend with one site (and not necessarily an online magazine) is relatively short before we move on to another to get a taste for what's available. On sites with content that truly merits reading, new material may be uploaded swiftly, but the columnists we read don't write that frequently, and often, by the time a new column appears we've moved on to other sites that have attracted our attention. From personal experience I can attest to the experience of clicking on a link that brings me to a site which I used to frequent and then saying to myself "Hey! I used to enjoy reading the material here. Why haven't I visited in such a long time?". And of course the answer is quite simply that there's so much else that's out there that it's hard to remain loyal to one site for very long.

Go to: Trying to make some sense out of all this, or
Go to: An introduction to the extroduction, or
Go to: Web Essays - The evolution of a (personal?) medium