YGingras^.net

For the blogger, making the front page on Digg or Reddit presents major impacts. It will bring in a tidal wave of traffic, several external links, a little fortune in adwords revenue and ultimately, crank up the page rank and consecrate the lucky author as the authority of a given subject. The initial wave is nice but it is the recurring traffic that makes websites lively.

Because of all the benefits of being reddited or dugg, it is not uncommon for a blogger to craft some of his posts in order to optimize his chance to make it to the front page on those popular news sites. There are even strategy guides to help him do that. One advice that is often given is to pick your submission time wisely. The idea that the submission time has an impact on the probability of making the front page appeals to common sense but it is supported by very little experimental data. Here I will describe a simple scheme to measure the activity patterns of social news websites.

Monitoring the activity level on collaborative news websites is actually quite easy. All what one has to do is to look at all the stories in the "new" or "upcoming" pages and to monitor how many of those do, eventually, make it to the front page. A cron job and a reliable network link is all what is required. I monitored the activity level on Digg and Reddit then plotted the results with this set of simple scripts. All the plots are using UTC time, the day tick mark is at midnight UTC and each datum summarizes one hour of activity.

The first conclusion is that there definitely is a cyclic activity pattern on both news sites. There is a major activity peek during the weekdays, mostly during the American daylight period. Reddit has its peak a bit earlier then Digg. I suspect that there are more Reddit submiters on the east coast and more Digg submiters on the west coast.

The other conclusion is that the time of submission has very little impact on the probability of making the front page. Intuitively, we would assume that the large number of new posts during the submission peaks makes it harder to reach the front page but we actually see nothing like that. This can be explained by the large availability of upvoters during the high activity periods. If there is a preferable time to submit, I would say that it's around 12h UTC on Sunday. I might need to clarify what is plotted. For each post, if it eventually makes it to the front page, it will worth one point on the datum of it's submission time, not the time that it makes it to the front page.

The time of submission might prove inconclusive but that's not to say that it's not worth monitoring the activity level of social news sites. Among the things that I want to measure next is the kind of stories that makes it to the front page. We all expect a higher density of lolcats on Digg but it will be interesting to see if there is a perfect time to submit Ron Paul stories on Reddit.