How long is a new link clicked on?

Yesterday one of my earlier posts was linked to by what appears to be a very high traffic blog – In just 24 hours the lifetime number of page views of my blog went up by almost 50%.

The traffic has already dried up to just a trickle, and it got me thinking about how long posts and links remain “live” before people stop clicking and their attention moves on. I happened to look several times over the day at my WordPress stats, jotting down a few numbers:

The inbound link was from a US site and the first I knew was in the morning European time, at around 500 visitors already.  Eyeballing it I would say that the number of inbound visitors halved every two hours. The URL shortening service Bitly have done a post on this (they have somewhat more data than marcgawley.com!)

So we looked at the half life of 1,000 popular bitly links and the results were surprisingly similar. The mean half-life of a link on twitter is 2.8 hours, on Facebook it’s 3.2 hours and via ‘direct’ sources (like email or IM clients) it’s 3.4 hours

I also experimented a little in the middle of the day, discovering that adding a couple of links to related posts of my own at the bottom of my article increased the page views per visitor by around 25%.

The number of new subscribers (welcome!) went up by at least 3 (wow! nb it’s hard to impossible to keep track of people subscribing via rss feeds), which implies something of the order of 1 new subscriber per 200 visitors to the blog. I believe that’s a typical ratio.

Oh, before I forget:

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