Estimate how long content takes to read.
Reading time is word count divided by reading speed, and 238 words per minute is the pooled adult average for silent reading of non-fiction — the 200 wpm figure most blogs use is conservative. Prose alone understates the real time on a page with visual content, so figures get about ten seconds each and code blocks or tables about twenty-five, since both are re-read rather than scanned. The skim figure assumes roughly two and a half times reading speed and is the honest estimate for how most readers actually consume long articles.
Content reading time
Minutes = words / words-per-minute + (images x 10s + code blocks x 25s) / 60
Around 238 words per minute for general adult non-fiction. Use 180 for dense technical material and 260 for light conversational prose. Reading aloud runs closer to 150.
Because readers stop at them. Ten seconds per figure is a reasonable average across charts that need decoding and photographs that need only a glance, and omitting them understates a figure-heavy article noticeably.
Round to the nearest minute with a floor of one, which is what this returns. Displaying '0 min read' or a decimal reads as broken, and readers treat the badge as a rough signal rather than a measurement.