"[x] minutes to read?" How do they calculate that?

Question

I've noticed a lot of platforms (blogs and such) list how long they estimate for a specific essay/post/article to take for the average reader. **How is this calculated?** I always read fast, so I can't just time myself -- plus, if adding a time-estimate to my *own* works, I'm going to know what I mean to say, and my reading-speed will be pretty fast. (But if I'm actually confusing and making a lot of assumptions, no matter how short it is, a not-me reader will take much longer.) Is there a standard bot everyone submits to, or some other resource/calculation?

Answer 1

It will vary from site to site, but it is likely that the site is using a simple 'time spent on page' metric. It's similar to those websites where it makes you wait (for example) 60 seconds before downloading something, but you need to keep that tab in the forefront for the timer to advance. So the amount of time someone had the tab in the foreground would effectively be their reading time. Naturally, there would be some boundary conditions to deal with instances where someone just leaves their browser open on that tab and walks away, as to avoid artificially inflating the mean reading time. But generally, this is the approach.

The static way to do this is of course to divide the number of words by the the average adult reading speed.