Blog Statistic – Length of Stay by Darren Rowse [via Blogcount]
Darren has analysed Site Meter statistics of 350 weblogs and found that in average a reader spends 96 seconds reading a weblog.
Other findings
- The top ten blogs on the list had an average of only 37 seconds where as the bottom ten averaged 83 seconds.
- Apart from the ‘top ten’ there was not a huge difference between blogs receiving high and low traffic. For example – blogs receiving 60 visits per day had an average visit length of 100 seconds which was almost the same as blogs averaging 2000 visits a day (ave 97 seconds).
- Blogs with comments scored a higher average than those without. (this might partly explain the ‘top ten’ scoring lower as most of them do not have comments) I did not collect data on this, but it became very clear anecdotally.
Darren notes that the accuracy of his survey is limited by Site Meter measurements. I would add one more: RSS readership is not accounted for as Site Meter counts only webpage views. I guess even with RSS traffic details there is no way to analyse how much time average RSS reader spends on reading a weblog :)
Suggested questions for further research
- Does blog design/loading time impact the the length of stay?
- Does blog topic impact the length of stay?
- Do bloggers from certain countries (with high local readership) have different lengths of stay?
- Does posting length have an impact?
By the way, if you go to check Darren’s weblog don’t miss his Gospel blogging and Blog tips series:
- Get to the Point
- Keep it Simple….Stupid
- Blog Designers
- Make it Scannable
- Titles are Everything
- The Rhythm Method
- Set Boundaries
- Comments
- Interactive Blog Tools
This post also appears on channel weblog research
Tags: blog new, blog readingArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/11/03.html#a822; comments are here.
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