Very loyal reader Chewxy informs me about some analysis by Jakob Nielsen of a study done by some others about web users’ habits.

The headline results for bloggers are: People spend 4.4 seconds per additional 100 words on a page. This means that readers will read about 18% of additional content.

This graph that Jakob made shows the maximum percentage of words that people could read on a page as a function of the number of words, taking account of the average amount of time that people spend on a page given the number of words that it has, at an average reading speed:

Conclusion: If you want to be read by the masses, keep it short.