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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?

#51

Post by JoeAltmaier »

gnosis wrote: post #47

I rarely read even the articles with interesting titles that make it to HN's front page. This is because when I did read more of them, they usually turned out to be a lot less interesting than the ensuing discussion on HN. So now I use the HN discussion as a proxy for article quality. In the HN discussion I can often find a good summary of the article and get a sense of whether the article is likely to be worth readi…

Yet that discussion is littered with uninformed pot-shots at the topic. We can hope that more than 6% of the HN comments come from folks who read/understand the topic I guess.

Btw how did you accumulate your '1 in 10' stats? Off the cuff? Can you think of a way to measure this? Because I don't think 1 in 10 articles 'deserve to be read'. Somebody DID read them, took the time to post them here. So for some audience at least they were meaningful.

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

#52

Post by rickdale »

jonknee wrote: post #46
_mpf wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I`ve read that doc, and it looks like you are right. Now i`m even more courious how they measure single hit reading time.

What is your pages per visit number?

Before changing the site to a multiple page site, I was averaging 1.2 pages/visit. Again with a 1 page site, but I would develop on the server so I figured GA was picking that up. Since changing to a multiple page site my pages/vist is 2.55 and my average time on site has increased by like 20 seconds, which seems a lot. Maybe people are on 56k, haha.

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

#53

Post by consz »

gnosis wrote: post #47

I rarely read even the articles with interesting titles that make it to HN's front page. This is because when I did read more of them, they usually turned out to be a lot less interesting than the ensuing discussion on HN. So now I use the HN discussion as a proxy for article quality. In the HN discussion I can often find a good summary of the article and get a sense of whether the article is likely to be worth readi…

Agreed, I'm the same way, I probably haven't clicked an article on HN in weeks, I usually just read the comment sections of articles that have interesting titles.

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

#54

Post by Smerity »

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 visits said it was from Hacker News.

I know, you don't want to leak the referrer in most circumstances when it's HTTPS, but it just seems so vital. The Internet was made and understood by referrals and links, lacking an ability to see referrers seems quite unfortunate, especially if all the Internet ends up HTTPS.

Google and Facebook are the only ones who would be able to stitch together significant portions of referral traffic due to Google Analytics or Facebook Like / Connect. Everyone else is just left stumbling around blind.

[1]: https://twitter.com/taybenlor/status/326622962377695232

[2]: https://twitter.com/Smerity/status/333534743670951936

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

#55

Post by cosmie »

There seems to be a lot of confusion about how GA tracks user engagement, which is understandable as even the Support article linked in another comment doesn't accurately explain what happens with single page visits.

First off, the metric by definition will always be skewed lower than reality. For multi-page visits, GA takes the time of the first hit and time of the second hit to calculate time on page (and will chain these together to get time on site). Since the page the user leaves on doesn't have a "second hit", that time is never included.[1]

For single page visits, as blog posts tend to be, the calculation is slightly different.[1]

   Time on Page = (time of last “engagement hit” on page) – (time of first hit from page)
If you set up Event Tracking to trigger as a user scrolls to predetermined lengths of your article, it'll trigger these 'engagement hits' and give you a better approximation of time on site. If you just throw in a standard tracking code that fires off a _trackPageview() event on page load, then GA will never see a second engagement and will not be able to calculate any approximation of time on page/site, so it'll default into the "less than 10 seconds" bucket. Depending on what blogging platform you're using, there are some add-ins that provide such functionality.[2]

[1] http://cutroni.com/blog/2012/02/29/understanding-google-anal...

[2]http://www.analytics-ninja.com/blog/2012/06/google-analytics...

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

#56

Post by gojomo »

trhiawd wrote: post #42
gojomo wrote: post #36

A post that estimated how many HN visitors block Google Analytics would be useful.

It may surprise you, but HN visitors are pretty low on the scale of privacy-concerned. /. and /g/ are far more active in using privacy tools.

It might surprise me a little. What are the numbers?

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

#58

Post by gnosis »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #51
gnosis wrote: post #47

I rarely read even the articles with interesting titles that make it to HN's front page. This is because when I did read more of them, they usually turned out to be a lot less interesting than the ensuing discussion on HN. So now I use the HN discussion as a proxy for article quality. In the HN discussion I can often find a good summary of the article and get a sense of whether the article is likely to be worth readi…

Yet that discussion is littered with uninformed pot-shots at the topic. We can hope that more than 6% of the HN comments come from folks who read/understand the topic I guess. Btw how did you accumulate your '1 in 10' stats? Off the cuff? Can you think of a way to measure this? Because I don't think 1 in 10 articles 'deserve to be read'. Somebody DID read them, took the time to post them here. So for some audience at…

"Btw how did you accumulate your '1 in 10' stats? Off the cuff?"

Yep. Just a rough estimate based on my sense of how many articles I actually bother clicking through to. Having a more accurate estimate of my own click-through rate would not be valuable to me, so I never bothered to try to find out.

"Can you think of a way to measure this?"

If I was interested in gathering such stats for myself, I suppose I could use a browser add-on to measure my HN use.

Alternatively, HN could start using indirect links. But I'm not sure if I'd stay with HN if they started doing that. I hate being spied upon, which is one major reason I stopped using Google, and would probably drop HN as well if they started going down that road. Not that HN really needs to do that, since they already know which HN discussion pages I open and what I write (which are reasons for me to start making myself a bit more anonymous in my HN use).

"Because I don't think 1 in 10 articles 'deserve to be read'. Somebody DID read them, took the time to post them here. So for some audience at least they were meaningful."

It all depends on who the audience is, doesn't it? If you aim for the lowest common denominator, you'll probably get a bigger audience. This is a major reason for much of the mainstream media content being such utter garbage (from my perspective).

Also, just because someone clicked through on an HN link doesn't mean that they liked what they found when they got there. The same goes for tracking of people clicking on "Like" buttons or even sending links to their friends.

People could have all sorts of reasons for clicking "Like" buttons that have nothing to do with them enjoying or even reading the content. And I can't count the number of times I've forwarded unread articles to friends because I thought it might be something they might be interested in, but that I had no interest in myself.

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

#59

Post by zerd »

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 the duration of a visit. I know that e.g. woopra makes a request every 10 seconds with different metrics, so they would at least get better accuracy than google analytics.

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

#60

Post by jseliger »

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 should click "Read Later" and then leaving, even though I do in fact read later.

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