Online news dies after 36 hours Boffins work out the science of net news http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32938 By Nick Farrell: Tuesday 11 July 2006, 07:49
BOFFINS at the University of Notre Dame, in the US, have proved what most newspaper journalists could have told them for the price of a beer, a web news story will die after 36 hours. Physicist Albert-László Barabási, working with a team from Hungary, had thought that the number of hits on a news story would grow exponentially over time as the story was distributed across the World Wide Wibble. In fact they found that the number of people who read a news story on the web decays with time. Barabási is interested in studying the Web as an example of a "complex network", with a topology that changes as new documents and links are continually added. The research reckons that a news site has a relatively stable "skeleton" of documents which creates a cumulative number of visitors over time. But news documents receive the most hits directly after their release, decrease with time and are useless after just a few days. The half-life of a news story is just 36 hours, or one and a half days after it is released. While this is short, it is longer than predicted by simple exponential models, which assume that web page browsing is less random than it actually is. This means that if punters do not visit the site for 36 hours they could miss out on the news entirely, which is why some publishers have resorted to RS Feeds or email alerts. Most punters read a particular web page not just because it looks interesting but because it can be accessed easily, the boffins found. It does not matter how important or interesting a story is, if it is older than 36 hours, interest in it will decay faster than yoghurt in a Saharan summer. More here. µ _______________________________________________ Infowarrior mailing list [email protected] https://attrition.org/mailman/listinfo/infowarrior
