Ahead of the US presidential election - and a week is a long time in politics - Chartbeat has published engagement statistics from its data science team.

Analysis of 'total engaged time' by candidate showed a large inequality between that generated by the sitting president and that pulled by Democratic candidate Joe Biden.

Prior to the first debate -marked by the large spike in engagement on the right side of the graph - Trump maintains an average of 15 million minutes of daily engaged time, with a pre-debate peak of 20 million minutes on August 9, when he signed several coronavirus relief executive orders. Biden maintains a lower average of three million minutes, with a pre-debate peak of eight million minutes on August 12, when Biden named Kamala Harris as running mate.

Chartbeat's Jon Wiggins says one possible reason for the disparity may be the unequal coverage, with 81 per cent of articles identified attributed to Trump.

Analysing candidate engagement on a per word basis produces a smilar-shaped chart, accounting for both the number of articles written, but also for the length of the articles themselves.

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Wiggins says Chartbeat found Trump also led viewing engagement per page view, with an average of 36 seconds of engaged time per page view compared to Biden's eight seconds.

Analysis of the 50 pieces of content readers most engaged with - reviewing Engaged Time, pageviews, and referral sources - showed short-form articles from search led the way, representing 67 per cent of those articles and 58 per cent of the total engagement by Engaged Time.

"While we cannot disclose the actual articles that received the highest levels of engagement to preserve the privacy of our partners, we can anecdotally say that they reflected the data we outlined above, in that they're largely related to the president," he says.

"This may be the result of a deliberate attempt by the Biden campaign to avoid extensive media coverage, even as he emerged to become the presumptive Democratic candidate for president.

Wiggins says key takeaways are that Trump still accounts for high levels of reader attention, and that readers are still drawn to breaking or recent content.

"Live blogs and longform, while showing notable reader engagement, paled in comparison to those daily pieces, suggesting readers may be adjusting their news consumption habits to wait for the 'full story' as it develops throughout the day."

Chartbeat identified 317,180 articles published between August 1 and October 1 that were principally about the candidates running for election. Portions of articles were further attributed to each of the candidates by how many times they were mentioned in the article. The Data Science team uses a proprietary, natural language processing system to determine the 'key entities' of each story. If either candidate was one of those key entities, they were then selected for inclusion in this study.