Where’s The Article Beef?
Here’s the deal … The minimum article count accepted here at EzineArticles is 250 400 words*, and that’s a problem for many reasons:
- It’s very rare when an individual can write a very high quality article under 300 words. So rare that I rarely see it myself.
- Thin content undermines the credibility of our site because if a user is dissatisfied, they will not return.
- The greatest offenders of our members who make promises in the article title that they don’t keep in the article body are in the sub 400-word count range.
- If you saw a cross-section of the article complaints that come in monthly, you’d quickly see that low word count articles is a constant theme in the offending articles.
- If we just raise the word count minimum to 300 words, those who write thin content will just increase their bloat by 50 more words and we haven’t solved the problem.
- The highest volume members are often in the barely 250-299 word content club … making this a sensitive topic because it means we will alienate our most engaged members in order to satisfy our users who demand beefy high quality original content.
One possible solution that I’m not thrilled with is to keep the 250 word count minimum but we could flag members who attract complaints or write thin content on purpose to have a different minimum word count requirement, such as 300, 350 or 400 words.
Your thoughts on how you would solve this challenge?
* This post was updated 3/1/2011
My own feeling is that you may want to have different word counts for different classes of article.
I.e. Poetry and Recipes are often shorter than 250 words, so you have to add extra words which are not really relent to your poem to meet your word count.
Your suggestions will only create a bigger problem.
It may be that just certain heading are coursing 80% of the problem. It may be you could adjust the word count to a higher level on these categories and reduce it on others like Poetry, etc.
I would be pleased to hear your thoughts on this idea.
George
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