Copywriting Services: You're Buying What Gets Cut

In a Nielsen Norman Group experiment from the 1990s, 79% of test users always scanned a new page, and only 16% read it word by word, according to Jakob Nielsen. Which means that most of what a company pays someone to write is never read. The question for anyone buying copywriting services is what, exactly, the money is for.

Table of Contents

The oldest test in web writing still points the same way

In the same study, Nielsen’s team built five versions of one website with identical information and navigation, then measured how people performed. Against a promotional-style control, the concise version, at about half the word count, scored 58% better on usability. The scannable version scored 47% better, the objective version 27% better, and the three changes combined reached 124%.

Read that with care. It is a nineties experiment on one website, and the page does not state the sample size. A follow-up by John Morkes and Jakob Nielsen in 1998, with 21 technical users, reported a rewritten site that was 159% better overall, again a small sample. I would not quote those percentages as a law of nature. I would take the direction seriously, because later guidance from the same group has not moved: Hoa Loranger’s 2017 rule of thumb is that web copy should use fewer than half the words of its print equivalent, with sentences of 15 to 20 words. That is a guideline, not a measured result, but it is a consistent one. Loranger also notes that “No one has ever complained that a text was too easy to understand”, even among experts.

Professional copywriting services are an editing service

Here is my reading of that evidence. Most buyers think they are purchasing words: pages, headlines, a tone of voice. The research suggests the value sits in the words that are not there. Cutting a page in half without losing the point is harder than writing it twice as long, because you have to know which half the reader needs. That takes judgement about the buyer and the business, which is why professional copywriting services should be judged on what a writer leaves out, and why seniority matters more here than in almost any other creative discipline.

Clarity is a commercial problem, not a style choice

You can see the stakes in buyer behaviour. In a survey of 646 B2B buyers fielded in late 2025, Gartner found that 67% prefer a rep-free buying experience. The same release reports that buyers with high decision confidence were twice as likely to describe a high-quality deal as those with low confidence. Gartner’s own term for what builds that confidence is “value clarity”: a clear understanding of how a solution improves outcomes in the buyer’s specific role and business context.

Gartner’s survey is about buying journeys, not website copy, and I do not want to stretch it. But the implication is hard to avoid. If two-thirds of buyers would rather not talk to a salesperson, the words on the page are doing the salesperson’s job, and they have to deliver that clarity for a particular reader, in a particular role.

There is a related warning in the 2021 Edelman and LinkedIn B2B thought leadership report, a survey of nearly 3,600 senior professionals. It found that 71% say half or less of the thought leadership they read gives them valuable insights. That study covers thought leadership rather than homepages, but it points the same way. Buyers are not short of content. They are short of content that is clear, specific and worth the time.

How to judge a copywriting service

If the value lies in subtraction and specificity, the usual way of buying copywriting services, by price per word or a portfolio of finished pages, tells you very little. Better questions: What would you cut from our current page, and why? Who exactly is this written for? What do you need to know about our buyer before you write anything? A writer who cannot answer is selling volume.

It is also why I believe in briefing first and recommending second. A good brief gives a writer the buyer, the decision and the constraint. From there, one senior writer matched to that brief will serve you better than a long list to browse. That is how we work at Copywriter Collective: a personally vetted roster, matched to your brief, not a database.