Most Popular Days

[Bebop3]

Does anyone have any idea about the traffic patterns on Lit?

What days do they get the most hits?

Thanks!

 

[NotWise]

What days do they get the most hits?

I started tracking views on my stories in fall, 2015 and have recorded them five days/week (Mon. - Fri.) ever since. The reading on Monday is the average for the weekend. Using the median views per day per story, there is no significant variation from day to day.

 

[Bebop3]

Thanks!

I appreciate the info. I would have assumed that the weekends were considerably busier, as people have more leisure time then.

 

[SimonDoom]

Thanks!

I appreciate the info. I would have assumed that the weekends were considerably busier, as people have more leisure time then.

I have not tracked this carefully, but my general impression is that my view counts are higher for the 24 hour Saturday to Sunday period than they are for other days. My impression is that Friday is a more lightly trafficked day. But I haven't followed this closely enough to say for sure. I don't think the day to day disparities are huge.

Something that makes a big difference is whether a lot of other authors publish stories in your category on the day you publish yours, because more authors means you'll be bumped off the new story hub for that category faster than otherwise. Remaining on that list longer means more views. But I have no idea whether certain days feature more new stories than others and if this is something one can time.

 

[NotWise]

Something that makes a big difference is whether a lot of other authors publish stories in your category on the day you publish yours, because more authors means you'll be bumped off the new story hub for that category faster than otherwise. Remaining on that list longer means more views. But I have no idea whether certain days feature more new stories than others and if this is something one can time.

I tracked (or tried to track) the number of new posts/day for about six months last year. It's a difficult thing to do, and even more difficult to do accurately.

What I got was that posts/day is highest for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday and lowest on Sunday.

I tried to use that information to get stories published over the weekend and never managed to do it. The stories would either come out early or late. The pattern of low posts on weekends may be Laurel's preference, rather than a natural result of having fewer stories submitted to her 2-3 days earlier.

 

[TxRad]

For some reason a few years ago, Laurel decided she didn't like posting stories on Sunday. That is where the low count on Sunday has come from.

 

[Kantarii]

The next leap of assumption is going to be when we find out the prime day to post a story - it will explain the backlog of dozens of new stories being posted. Unfortunate for someone, but their story will be posted further down in the headlines and not receive a fair share of time on the page to receive views, votes, or comments - things that authors crave, but rarely receive.

Personally, I used to try to post my stories to where they appeared about Friday morning on Lit. It worked for a while, but I found I got better results on my stories when they posted Sunday/Monday since they sat at the top of the headlines for a few days until the rush to post on Friday came around again.

Kant

 

[NotWise]

I appreciate the info. I would have assumed that the weekends were considerably busier, as people have more leisure time then.

I always thought it would work out that way, but it hasn't.

Is it really the normal pattern of reading that you're interested in, or do you want to know what the best day would be to have a story published? That's a harder question for me to answer, since I don't have that many stories up, and they're in a variety of categories.

The distribution of views/story/day is bimodal. The largest peak is the normal daily reads and that varies very little from day to day. The other peak is the very high rate that you get right after a story is published. Given all sorts of disclaimers about my results being unrepresentative, etc., my largest number of reads the first two days a story is up come on Thursday, and the lowest on Tuesday. I don't have a record of a story being published on the weekend.

Maybe it isn't significant, but the views for the first two days after my new stories are published on Thursday averages nearly 12,000. On Tuesday it's a little over 3,000.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Maybe it isn't significant, but the views for the first two days after my new stories are published on Thursday averages nearly 12,000. On Tuesday it's a little over 3,000.

That makes sense - a Thursday story will catch the first wave of weekend readers - who don't go out on a Friday night.

 

[RejectReality]

Sunday is garbage, and has always been garbage. Avoid it like the plague. I'll pull a story out of the queue if I think it's in danger of releasing on Sunday.

Otherwise, my experience is that stories hitting Thursday night ( early Friday morning ) get the most eyes, though it's not a huge amount beyond any other weekday.

 

[HectorBidon]

Only about half as many stories come out on Sunday and Monday as on the other days. I presume this is to lighten the weekend workload of the people who run the site. I looked at the total number of first-two-day views for stories published on two days last December that happened to be a Sunday and a Thursday, and this is what I found:

The results suggest that there is a weekend effect, but it's not all that big. The 12/14 (Thursday) batch of stories actually got more total views than the 12/10 (Sunday) batch (540k vs 444k). This suggests that readers are reading as much during the week as on weekends.

However, the Sunday batch received more views per story (8076 vs 5044 on average). This is because there were fewer stories on Sunday. The site seems to be putting up about 100 stories on Tuesday through Saturday, but only about half as many on Sunday and Monday. So this suggests that there might be a slight advantage to getting your story published on Sunday (or presumably Monday), as it will face less competition.

Of course this is just based on two days, and there might be seasonal fluctuations both in the total number of views per week and the distribution within the week. Still, though, I think that story category, title/description catchiness, and author reputation are bigger determinants of the number of views a story will get than day of publication.