Online news stories typically have a 36 hour shelf life, according to a study by a group of physicists hailing from Notre Dame University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and Harvard. While traditional print and broadcast news media are constrained by 24 hour daily schedules, visits to online news stories typically peak within a few hours and decay rapidly over the course of a day and a half.
The study shows that, mathematically speaking, visits to online news stories follow a pattern in time that is similar to maps of connections between web sites and social groups. That is, visits to news stories decreased in the form of a power law - a mathematical law that turns up frequently in self organizing interactions in nature and society, which are frequently studied in a field of physics know as complexity theory.
The researchers based their study on visits to a major European news site, www.origo.hu, which receives over 6.5 million hits per day. In addition to revealing the form of the decay in news story interest, the researchers confirmed that comparative interest in specific stories also varied with a power law, which in turns shows that most visitors only view the headlines of about 53% of items on a news site, and actually read only 7% of news stories.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-07/aps-3hn071306.php
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
