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HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article?

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Re: HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article?

#2
Interesting, that ties in with my observations of around 700 visitors per hour on the front page - http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/11/whats-the-front-page-of-hack...

While I didn't track engagement time, I looked at number of comments (both here and on my posts, and shares on Twitter and Facebook) to try and figure out how much of it was "real" traffic.

Re: HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article?

#6
post #4

If the article is long, I usually add it to instapaper or pocket to read later. The time spent on the actual site is low but I still engage with the content.

good point, I'll keep an eye on returning visitor metric over the next few days

Re: HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article?

#8
These data are not being interpreted correctly. Analytics calculates time-on-page based on the time between loads of the google JS embedded in your pages. Any visitor who 'bounces' - that is, only visits a single page - only loads the JS once, so their time-on-page is recorded as 0 seconds, regardless of how long they actually spent on the page.

Re: HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article?

#9

Analytics calculates the time on page by the time difference _between_ page hits. One hit: 0 seconds on site. Because of this, it isn't an accurate metric to measure engagement for a single blog post.

I assumed they have some fancy javascript thing to take care of that? what would you suggest to use to estimate actually readership?

Re: HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article?

#10

These data are not being interpreted correctly. Analytics calculates time-on-page based on the time between loads of the google JS embedded in your pages. Any visitor who 'bounces' - that is, only visits a single page - only loads the JS once, so their time-on-page is recorded as 0 seconds, regardless of how long they actually spent on the page.

Exactly what I came here to say. Those people could have spent 10 hours really absorbing that one article and their time would have still been recorded as 0 seconds.
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