Coefficient of Evergreen Content

Have you ever wondered why there are so many articles on the web that begin with

“Seven things you need to know…”

“Ten things that…”

? (query can you put a question mark there just like that?)

Well research has found that people love this sort of bite-sized content. Concise and easy to digest, plus people know what they are in for before they start reading. It’s got to be better than getting interested in a paper only to find that the bastard is over 20 pages long.

Indeed this sort of ‘list content’ is close to ‘evergreen content’ – that is, it can stay up on a site and keep getting readers because it doesn’t get ‘old’ very quickly. It’s information not news. Also it can happily get re-published or re-blogged many times over; even if people have read it before they will forget they have done so.

I think we need an ‘Evergreen Coefficient’ for content. Ranging between 0 and 1 where a tweet has an evergreen coefficient of 0 and the bible has an evergreen coefficient of 1. Hopefully some smart dudes will figure out some algorithms to predict the evergreen coefficient of any new body of work and this will help authors pick their niche and get paid.