If you don’t know many people in this sample, you could just buy traffic to these articles (from that target audience—facebook or google would work great, stumbleupon should also do), and then judge by the total amount of time spent reading by 100 visitors.
Or hang up the articles as flyers at your local college campus (though this assumes that audience), and see if anyone picks them up to read them (and how long they read if they do).
Two more ideas:
If you don’t know many people in this sample, you could just buy traffic to these articles (from that target audience—facebook or google would work great, stumbleupon should also do), and then judge by the total amount of time spent reading by 100 visitors.
Or hang up the articles as flyers at your local college campus (though this assumes that audience), and see if anyone picks them up to read them (and how long they read if they do).