The clock
How fifteen minutes is measured
Every stage holds at most fifteen minutes of a visitor’s time. A song or a film tells us its own length. Writing and pictures don’t, so we estimate them the same way for everyone, with the rules below. No secret scoring, no favorites.
The rules
| Piece | How it’s timed | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Writing, bios, quotes | Words ÷ 238 words a minute, plus 2 seconds to find your place. At least 5 seconds. | 238 words a minute is the average adult silent-reading speed for non-fiction across nearly 200 studies (Brysbaert, 2019). |
| Poems | Words ÷ 150 words a minute, plus 0.6 seconds for each line break and 2 for each gap between stanzas. At least 8 seconds. | Poems are read slower than prose, and the white space is part of the poem. Line and stanza breaks are pauses, so they count. |
| Photos | 10 seconds × how detailed the image is, plus its caption. | A photo is usually taken in at a glance and a second look. |
| Artwork | 20 seconds × how detailed the image is, plus its caption. | Museum studies find most people give a single work well under thirty seconds. We give art a little more than a photo. |
| Songs, audio, video | Their running time, rounded up to the second, plus any caption. | It’s exact: we read the length from the file itself. |
| Links | 3 seconds. | Time spent on another website isn’t part of your fifteen minutes. |
| Your photo, name, headline and background | Free. | They frame your stage; they aren’t what’s on it. |
How “detailed” is measured
We shrink the image to 512 pixels on its longest side and save it as a standard JPEG. Detailed images don’t compress well; simple ones do. The number of bits each pixel needs, beyond what a blank image of the same size needs, sets a multiplier between 0.7 (a flat graphic) and 1.6 (dense detail). It’s a measure of how much there is to look at, not of how good the work is.
The limit
Add everything up and it has to come to 15:00 or less. The ring in Backstage fills as you go. When it’s full, a piece can wait in the Wings (pieces there don’t count) until you swap it back in. Words are counted the same in every language; in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, two characters count as one word.
Try it on your own work
Paste some writing or pick an image. Nothing you enter here is saved. Images are measured and thrown away.