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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?

#61

Post by Smerity »

zerd wrote: post #59
Smerity wrote: post #54

I was just discussing this with a friend today. We both had front page stories on HN recently. He reported 6k of 6.8k[1] leaving within 10 seconds and I saw that 11k of 13.5k[2] left within 10 seconds. If these numbers aren't accurate due to Google Analytics, I'd be interested to know a way to get the accurate numbers. The other annoying thing was that, HTTPS never sends referrers. Hence, not a single one of my visit…

To get an accurate number of the duration of a visit you'd have to make a ajax request every second or so, or somehow make a request whenever the user closes the tab. Also, you need to measure if the tab loses focus. To get even more accurate you could store the amount of scroll the user has done over the duration, to see if the visitor actually read to the bottom. These ways are seen as quite invasive just to get th…

Understood. Other services do accurately measure this however. ChartBeat[1] tries to differentiate between users who are reading, writing and so on. Re: your example, it does literally keep track of how far you scrolled as well.

Unfortunately, my personal website is not their target market. Plans start at $9.95 per month: infinitely more than my hosting cost and also overkill for whenever I'm not front paged. It'd only really make sense for me if it had pricing based on usage, which I can almost guarantee they'll never launch.

I'd argue that Google Analytics is vague in defining or explaining their terms. In a perfect world, yes, they'd offer "pings" to see if a user is active, but even without that I'd at least hope they clarify their terms. Misunderstood terms lead to misunderstood statistics. The less misunderstood statistics, the better.

[1]: https://chartbeat.com/

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

#62

Post by koshak »

Can anyone count those who read translations without link to the original article or to the HN discussion?...

Do this stats make any sense at all?

Rephrase: can anyone count positive effect of the articles mentioned on HN and further discussions to them?

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

#63

Post by Smerity »

jseliger wrote: post #60
Smerity wrote: post #54

I was just discussing this with a friend today. We both had front page stories on HN recently. He reported 6k of 6.8k[1] leaving within 10 seconds and I saw that 11k of 13.5k[2] left within 10 seconds. If these numbers aren't accurate due to Google Analytics, I'd be interested to know a way to get the accurate numbers. The other annoying thing was that, HTTPS never sends referrers. Hence, not a single one of my visit…

I was just discussing this with a friend today. We both had front page stories on HN recently. He reported 6k of 6.8k[1] leaving within 10 seconds and I saw that 11k of 13.5k[2] left within 10 seconds. This is probably minority behavior, but I will often use Instapaper to bookmark articles for later, and then read a batch together. For most in-depth articles, I probably spend less than ten seconds decide whether I sh…

I did consider the possibility of Instapaper, Readability or other similar apps, but as you say I couldn't imagine they'd be the majority, even on the relatively tech savvy Hacker News.

As an example of alternate HN clients, hckrnews.com had 124 referrals, ihackernews.com had 85, HackerWeb had 77 and PulseWeb had 48. That's a grand total of around 300 out of 13.5k.

I'd imagine Readability and Instapaper to be big but probably only some small multiple of that at best.

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

#64

Post by hispanic »

For me (echoing some of what gnosis has stated), the real value that HN brings is the discussion. Frequently, I find the comments, insights, opinions, and tangents elicited by HN submissions to be more interesting and thought-provoking than the submissions themselves. I typically browse through the discussion a good bit before ever clicking through to the article/site which initially drove the discussion. There are plenty of "show-and-tell" mechanisms on the Web. What sets HN apart, in my mind, is the round-table that develops in response to a lot of those submissions.

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

#67

Post by gwern »

Smerity wrote: post #63
jseliger wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just discussing this with a friend today. We both had front page stories on HN recently. He reported 6k of 6.8k[1] leaving within 10 seconds and I saw that 11k of 13.5k[2] left within 10 seconds. This is probably minority behavior, but I will often use Instapaper to bookmark articles for later, and then read a batch together. For most in-depth articles, I probably spend less than ten seconds decide whether I sh…

I did consider the possibility of Instapaper, Readability or other similar apps, but as you say I couldn't imagine they'd be the majority, even on the relatively tech savvy Hacker News. As an example of alternate HN clients, hckrnews.com had 124 referrals, ihackernews.com had 85, HackerWeb had 77 and PulseWeb had 48. That's a grand total of around 300 out of 13.5k. I'd imagine Readability and Instapaper to be big but…

> As an example of alternate HN clients, hckrnews.com had 124 referrals, ihackernews.com had 85, HackerWeb had 77 and PulseWeb had 48. That's a grand total of around 300 out of 13.5k.

I see similar proportions for submissions of my pages as well.

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

#68

Post by gwern »

Here's a bit of data: last week my page http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns was submitted to Hacker News and hit the front page for a while, racking up thousands of visitors. As it happens, I was running an A/B test on fonts, where a JavaScript timer sleeps 40 seconds and then fires, telling Google Analytics that a reader has 'converted'. (This hopefully avoids the bouncing distortion of the 'time on page' metric.) So, what percentage of readers stayed on the page long enough for the timer to fire after 40 seconds? (The Markdown source is somewhere around 12k words, so it's not the quickest read in the world.)

~18%

(See http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85192141/Analytics%20www.... )

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

#69

Post by BCM43 »

gwern wrote: post #68

Here's a bit of data: last week my page http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns was submitted to Hacker News and hit the front page for a while, racking up thousands of visitors. As it happens, I was running an A/B test on fonts, where a JavaScript timer sleeps 40 seconds and then fires, telling Google Analytics that a reader has 'converted'. (This hopefully avoids the bouncing distortion of the 'time on page' metric…

What happens if a user is running noscript?

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

#70

Post by tylerneylon »

As another data point, I recently had a 60% read rate on a post that was on HN's front page for a while.

It was a post on medium.com about Pac-Man. Medium tracks number of views and number of reads per day. I think they use a metric that's not just time-on-page to differentiate between views and reads. My post had about 26k views and about 15k reads the day it was on the front page.

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