How much do people read on their phones?
How much do people read on their phones?
There is a notion that people don’t read substantial things on their phone. That is not true, at least based on how people read on Medium. The typical Medium App user spends 25% more time reading per day than Desktop users. Not only that, Medium App users share and interact twice as much with posts compared to Desktop users.
Above we look at how Minutes read per user per day (MRPU) differ by platform. Users can read Medium on three different platforms: Desktop, Mobile web and App (Android and iOS). On the first two they can be either logged in or logged out. Taken together this gives us five different use cases to split reading behavior on.
MRPU is more than twice as high on Medium App compared to Desktop (logged out) and circa 25% higher compared to Desktop (logged in). And we are seeing that the trend is that MRPU for the Medium App is growing faster than the other use cases.
Medium App users read more because they have more sessions and read more posts per session
Why do MRPU differ between the different use cases? One way to better understand MRPU is to look at the different actions that make up the metric. One way of thinking about it is this equation:
MRPU = Sessions per day * Posts per session * Minutes read per post
Let us break down MRPU and see how these components differ between our use cases: