Ever ask yourself what day of the week generates the most front-page Sphinns? Or after how many days a Sphinn submission has a next to zero chance of going hot? How about the question of just how much influence an elite few have on Sphinn content? I'm going to answer such questions using data on over 2,500 front-page Sphinns dating back to Sphinn.com's launch back in July 2007.
First up, some time-based Sphinn data. These two charts show which days of the week and which hours of the day have the most items going hot. Thursday is the winner with a slight lead over Tuesday and Wednesday. Between 11am and 2pm are the most popular hours for submissions to go hot with 5pm also being a popular time. All times are EST.
Although not evident in the graphs, note that 56% of the submissions went hot on the same day and another 28% went hot the next day. That's a whopping 85% of submissions so if your article doesn't go hot fairly quickly, you might as well stop with the constant browser refreshing and move on. What do you mean I'm the only one that does the browser refresh thing!?
Connected to the two time-based graphs is the following overall trend of hot submission growth since July 2007. Despite a dip late in December, growth looks to be trending up. This means more items are making it to the front-page, but, on average, each item is there for a shorter period of time.
Next up is a graph that shows the distribution of the number of Sphinns for hot items. Of course, once something goes hot you might argue that it really doesn't matter how many Sphinns that item gets unless you're hoping to break into the greatest hits listing. By the way, I'll save you a click and tell you that an article by John Andrews holds the top spot with 204 Sphinns (note that John has an active campaign to increase the Sphinns for his post so the number is probably higher by now). In addition, 6 out of the top 7 greatest hits were submitted by the article authors (John Andrews, Matt McGee, Rand Fishkin, Lee Odden, Vanessa Fox, and Danny Sullivan). Nothing wrong there, just an observation that you don't necessarily need to wait for a friendly Sphinner to get the ball rolling.
In terms of top 10 users, we've got the usual suspects. Even before looking at my data or the network page on Sphinn.com, a co-worker guessed that doshdosh (Maki) and aimclear (Marty Weintraub) would be in the top 3 and he wasn't surprised when I told him that Andy Beard was also part of the trio. Rounding out the top 5 are Jeff Quipp and Lyndon Antcliff. The top 5, 10, and 25 submitters account for 22%, 34%, and 52% of the hot submissions.
If you're a Sphinn power user you probably have an intuitive feel for the above data already, but those of you that are relatively new to Sphinn, I hope you found something of value here. And for those interested in past attempts at quantifying Sphinn activity, check out these two posts from theGypsy (How to Dominate Sphinn in 4 Easy Steps) and Jeff Quipp (13 Interesting Stats About Sphinn).
Related SEO/SEM Articles:- Sphinn - Many Voices or Just a Few?
- Hiding the Sphinn Button When a Post Fails to Go Hot
- How to Show the Sphinn Button Only AFTER the First Sphinn
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- A Day in the Life of a Digg
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Excellent post Marios! I can only imagine how much time this might have taken you. I can't wait until some one does some sort of analysis detailing which sites hit the front page the most often. We summed that once for the Sphinn Awards, but no again after that.
Jeff,
That's a good idea. I actually figured I'd miss something so I kept all of the raw data for future crunching
Great post Marios ... I love seeing numbers crunched and interpreted! Cudos.
Oh man...
You stole my idea...
)
Actually, my idea was to map the Live page and make a graph of the busiest hours when people sphinn articles. Since the Live script is in Ajax, grabbing the page content on defined time intervals does not work. I tried grabbing a snapshot every half hour, but that didn't work either, got meself a weekend of snapshots of the same screen for some reason
))
Anyways, kudos for the great article.
nEYNE,
The live page could reveal some good patterns too. It's a particularly good source of data related to the order in which activities happen e.g. figuring out when particular users are most active.
Yes, I do the browser refresh thing too
They need a "Sphinn monitor" like they have for Digg that alerts you when there's a new sphinn or comment.
Very nice. Looks like you really put a lot of time and effort into this. Nothing beats a day without some raw Sphinn stats
Thanks Marios.
Thank you for taking so much time and doing this. It's a real contribution to the community.
Really enjoyed this article, thanks for all the hard work you put into it.
This is very interesting. Some of the charts I would have guessed, but others were a surprise. I'm curious to see the same analysis done in one year from now.
Great post Marios
Great post, how did you get all the data?
Wonderful post! yeah! same with Glen, where did you get all these data?
Great fun... And so the obsession continues. I do admit to being a bit of a numbers junky and such trivialities titillate, you have out done yourself. I would suggest you head straight to the local pub and get properly sloshed. Let us never speak of this again... hee hee...
Nice work and thanks for the love on my humble little rant :0)
Dave
Marios,
Nicely put together and thanks for the mention. A valuable piece of analysis for those that wish to see what it takes to have their best shot at front page Sphinns.
@Marios
Yeah, that is what I thought. The only problem now is gathering all the data for, lets say, a week. I guess manual could work, but I do have a life.
If you have any clever way of grabbing AJAX content on a set intervals of time, drop me a l ine, maybe we can work something out together.
Or we could ask Danny for logs, but I have a hunch that will not go down well
Thanks for sharing this data, Marios! A lot of this stuff was understood in a rather vague manner, but your charts sort of help nail it down.
If I had to guess, these trends apply to virtually any social bookmarking site. Who's up for pulling similar data for all the major bookmarking sites and layering them over one another to get a comprehensive viewpoint?
Hugo,
I figured that Sphinn was new enough that it was worth looking at the data. Some Digg data would be great, but the recent algorithm changes may affect previous trends. Being new, Mixx might be another one to look at.
news to me... i had no idea of wat sphinn is or was... where did you get all this data?