The way web users glance over web content

The browsers rarely go through web pages word by word...

[Monalisa]

How web users go through web content?

The browsers rarely go through web pages word by word. Rather they tend to scan the web pages, concentrating on certain phrases and individual sentences. Detailed research on how browsers go through web pages have been conducted, and it is discovered that 79 % of the users scanned a new page they came across while only 16 % browsers read word-by-word.

Thus, Web pages need to use scannable text inserting

I.highlighted keywords.
II.use of subheads
III.enumeration of points using bullets
IV.describe separate ideas in separate paragraphs

[badbadmonkey]

Have structured content which initially appears shallow and concise, but with links to more in-depth content. E.g. a very brief introductory page, with a paragraph or two and some bullet points, and a link "read more", which then has a page or so of copy but still concise and to the point. Thereafter, link(s) to full in-depth material with no-holds-barred.

The style you outline can evolve as the visitor goes deeper and deeper, from this extreme "ad" copy format, to ultimately an encyclopedic style.

This satisfies the A.D.D. monkeys spasm'ing at their mouses and anxious to return to Google, while still providing quality material for those who are more patient and interested.

This also allows you to qualify the more important visitors, dynamically alter the goals and calls-to-action for each visitor, and also monitor the resulting statistics to put some numbers on the monkeys vs the scholars, how that applies to traffic sources, etc...

[tangor]

There's "old school" and "new school" in play. Sadly the sound/word byte gen has no attention span... they can't even finish watching the DVD they just downloaded before getting into their game which they don't finish before listening to their bit torrent and...

It's a crap shoot.

Make your site quality, first. Make it accessible via headers, subs, etc. Serve the content. THEN monetize it if that is the goal. Skip any of those and, well, the short-attention span folks won't mind because they can't do any of the above anyway.