How To Estimate Any Article’s Read Time

Learn how to determine an article’s average reading time using web crawling with Python

To view the source code, please visit my GitHub page.

When was the last time you decided to read an article based on its read time? To me, it happens quite often.

Offering an article’s reading time estimation to your site’s content can contribute significantly to your end-users.

First of all, it allows end-users to prepare the time they need to read an article in full. Secondly, it could help them choose the right article for the right amount of available time they have.

Lastly, it opens a whole new range of features, sorting options, and filter improvements you can offer (like filtering articles by reading time).

In this post, I will walk you through how to estimate the reading time of any public article URL by crawling and making simple calculations (written in Python).

By the way, this post’s reading time is estimated to be five minutes. Medium says it’s three minutes (See how they calculate read time here). So, tell me who’s more accurate.

Estimating Words per Minute

Words per minute, commonly abbreviated WPM, is a measure of words processed in a minute, often used as a measurement of the speed of typing or reading.

WPM has many meanings and complications. The first is that average reading time is subjective. Secondly, the length or duration of words is clearly variable, as some words can be read very quickly (like ‘dog’) while others take much longer (like ‘rhinoceros’).

Therefore, the definition of each word is often standardized to be five characters long.

Other parameters affect the reading time such as font type and size, your age, whether you’re reading on a monitor or paper, and even the number of paragraphs, images, and buttons in the article’s site.

Based on research done in this field, people are able to read English at 200 WPM on paper, and 180 WPM on a monitor (the current record is 290 WPM).