Thursday at Noon is the best time post and be noticed (PST)
It’s happened to me a few times; I stay up late working on a great post and finish at 1am EST. In a rush of excitement I decide to submit it to reddit or del.icio.us and goto bed fully expecting to see it on the front page of their sites the next morning. Of course this rarely happens… so being a programmer I figured I should do some analysis on the best time to post.My approach was simple: Look at the times of day and days of the week that have the most popular posts. To define popularity I used AideRSS’s Postrank ™.
PostRank™ is a scoring system that we have developed to rank each article on relevance and reaction. PostRank ranges from 1-10.
Using the aiderss feed api, I fetched the last 10,000 posts on delicious, digg, reddit, and mixx…Threw it into R and plotted out the number of posts by weekday and posts by hour of day with PostRank > 6
*NOTE* Hours are displayed in GMT
It’s pretty clear that Tues - Friday between 10am - 2pm PST are the “hot times” for popular blog posts.
Now, I didn’t filter out non-english posts and this doesn’t account for the time it took for the posts to get to the front page of these sites, but I do think it’s clear posting late at night or on the weekends + monday is a bad idea. Your post will most likley go unnoticed.
Writen by![[del.icio.us]](/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.ico)
![[Digg]](/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.ico)
![[dzone]](/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/dzone.ico)
![[Google]](/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/google.ico)
![[Mixx]](/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/mixx.ico)
![[Reddit]](/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/reddit.ico)
![[StumbleUpon]](/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/stumbleupon.ico)
May 2nd, 2008 at 1:32 pm
[…] more information on Jake’s findings, see his blog post, and to get started with the AideRSS API, take a look at our API […]
May 2nd, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Couple of broken links here, the very first one and the one to R - but would love to discuss this with you for a post on RWW. Can you email me about a couple of questions I’ve got?
May 2nd, 2008 at 3:47 pm
I believe you have secured your star on the “Social media” walk of fame, my friend. Very cool stat to dig up [or mix up… whichever you prefer… hehehe]
Would have been funny had it actually been posted on a Thursday at Noon. ;)
May 2nd, 2008 at 5:50 pm
[…] a post. Data is derived from various information collected through aideRSS. I will not steal the original authors’ thunder by posting the answer here but I agree with the numbers for blogs which have a primarily US reader […]
May 2nd, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Good info Jake, thanks. But search as I may, I can’t for the life of me find Thurday on my Blackberry or on any of my calendars. ;)
May 2nd, 2008 at 6:53 pm
[…] Jack Luciani a testé la diffusion de 10 000 articles sur Del.ici.us, Reddit et Mixx pour avaluer le rapport entre la popularité d’un article et le moment de sa publication. Il a ainsi déterminé les horaires et les jours om il vaut mieux poster des notes et les soumettre aux sites précités pour obtenir un maximum de votes, de commentaires et de liens entrants. Sa conclusion : il vaut mieux poster entre 13h et 15h ou entre 17h et 19h. Le jeudi est le meilleur jour. Par contre, si vous postez le week-end entre 15h et 17h, vous pouvez être presque sûr que votre article passera inaperçu […]
May 2nd, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems like you’re not accounting for the volume of items submitted at different times, so that a post at 2 am might be proportionally more likely to become popular, even though the absolute number is smaller, because the total number is also smaller.
May 2nd, 2008 at 9:01 pm
I have noticed something unusual about Thursdays too but I don’t know if there is a correlation. Google Adsense clicks pay out more for me on this day too. Is there something about Thursdays?
May 2nd, 2008 at 9:06 pm
[…] Kirkpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb found an interesting bit of analysis done by coder and blogger Jake Luciani using the AideRSS system as a basis for his […]
May 2nd, 2008 at 9:31 pm
I think there might be a nice deal of variety across niches, and blog personality–would be interested in seeing some cross-sector comparisons.
May 3rd, 2008 at 12:28 am
@Owen, PostRank tracks the quality of the post so it represents the posts with the most reaction.
May 3rd, 2008 at 1:12 am
@Richard H, good find! Like I said I blog late at night :)
May 3rd, 2008 at 1:49 am
[…] Jeder Blogger d?rfte das Ph?nomen kennen, dass Wochenendposts meist nur schlecht wahrgenommen werden. Die Leute k?mmern sich um ihre Familie und sind unterwegs, statt im Internet Blogs abzuklappern. Jake Luciani hat das Ph?nomen genauer betrachtet: […]
May 3rd, 2008 at 1:57 am
[…] at skrive tips skal du oprette en bruger, det er let og ligetil. Du kan se alle tips via RSS feed.Third rail har analyseret […]
May 3rd, 2008 at 3:59 am
[…] your blog posts? On what days? This post at Read/Write Web says, according to a study conducted by Jake Luciani, that the best time to publish your blog posts is between 1pm and 3 pm (PST) and then between 5 pm […]
May 3rd, 2008 at 9:59 am
@Jake, that’s why I said “maybe.” Post-rank’s algorithm is not really clear.
May 3rd, 2008 at 12:18 pm
[…] Jake Luciani ha confrontato 10,000 post sui principali aggregatori e ha scoperto che il miglior giorno alla settimana per pubblicare i post è il giovedì e l’orario migliore è tra le 17:00 e le 21:00. Di seguito due grafici esplicativi. […]
May 3rd, 2008 at 3:18 pm
The data are accurate: these are the days and times that people browse.
The conclusion is absurd: there is no correlation between publication time and browsing time. Publish on Sunday and the post is read on Tuesday. That is the only conclusion you can draw. That a post will go unnoticed or is better published on a busy web day cannot be determined.
May 3rd, 2008 at 7:01 pm
[…] to jake at Third Rail, Thursday at noon (PST) is the best time to post. He goes on to say ‘It’s pretty clear that Tues - Friday between […]
May 3rd, 2008 at 10:20 pm
[…] software developer Jake Luciani has run 10k items on Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit and Mixx through the API of popularity ranking […]
May 4th, 2008 at 4:58 am
[…] in the global commnity that is web 2.0. You can read the full analysis on Luciani’s site, 3rd rail. addthis_url = […]
May 5th, 2008 at 4:36 am
I agree with Rob in that this is nonsensical and the conclusion is plain wrong. What this study shows is merely when people browse the internet; nothing else can be deduced from the data. For this study to say anything at all, it would have been necessary to compare popular posts (the figures in the article) with unpopular posts (with lower rank). If there was a significant difference between the two sets of data in terms of publish time, then a conclusion might have be drawn.
For example, if the data showed that popular posts were more frequently posed during certain hours, it might perhaps be deduced that publish time is correlated to popularity. As it is now, this study shows merely when people surf the Internet. I highly doubt that a significant difference will be found, but I would be overjoyed if someone did the necessary statistics (after all, I came here to learn about when to publish my posts!).
On the contrary, it could be argued that it is bad posting during the hours indicated here, because competition is much stronger (provided that you are not writing things so important or interesting that you will beat everyone else regardless, but I think we can safely assume that is not the case for most people). Instead, posting late at night might give you more views and comments because there is simply not much else around to read. Of course, I cannot back up this hypothesis with any data, but that is true for this article as well.
May 5th, 2008 at 5:01 am
[…] Once again, ReadWriteWeb provides a few new nuggets of insight for social media practitioners. Marshall Kirkpatrick provides information about the best and worst times to submit news stories or blog posts to social news and social bookmarking sites. Read his article to get a better understanding of Jake Luciani’s study (or, for that matter, read Jake’s own post about the study.) […]
May 5th, 2008 at 9:51 am
Like IBM’s study in the 70s or 80s that “people are more receptive to new information on a Tuesday” I love data like these because it means if the suggestion become popular, even a “rule”, and people really do start posting only between 10am-2pm, Pacific, Tues-Fri, with the belief that is when “popular posts” are published, it will skew the data as everyone clamors for the “right” time to publish, making space for us to post great content at our websites and not get caught in the crowd.
The thing to realize is that there are many metrics that may be important in an online business and “Diggs” or “popularity” may not count at all. As we’ve seen in the dot-com bubble #1, popularity or eyeballs alone do not a business build. We’ve proven that low-trafficked but high converting ($$$ or email signups) content far exceed any content where the only metric of success is “popularity”.
Keep on publishing these kind of data - I love them.
May 5th, 2008 at 11:29 am
[…] there’s even advice on the best and worst times to post entries. (Found via […]
May 6th, 2008 at 3:55 am
[…] by stedrayton on 06 May 2008 at 12:55 am | Tagged as: Learn Connecticut software developer Jake Luciani has run 10k items on Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit and Mixx through the API of popularity ranking […]
May 6th, 2008 at 10:05 am
[…] Last week I read a post about the best time to submit a story to social news sites that seemed somewhat flawed. For starters it didn’t account for volume of submissions (or at least didn’t seem to). […]
May 6th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
[…] « Thursday at Noon is the best time post and be noticed (PST) […]
May 6th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
[…] today to Jake Luciani’s efforts to locate the best time to send out a blog post. He’s deduced that “Tues - Friday between 10am - 2pm PST” is the best time to unleash a blog post […]
May 7th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
[…] an article that claims Thursday after lunch is the best time to post your blog entry. But the study is flawed, not because it is necessarily incorrect, but because it does not document […]
May 8th, 2008 at 5:44 am
I’m not sure the time of posting makes one iota of difference. The time it lands in Digg or Reddit or whatever may be more important, though. For example, if your post hits the digg “upcoming” list (i.e. is first dugg) at prime web time, then it stands more of a chance of finding readers from that source than at a less busy period. Therefore, I fail to see why any particular time can be considered ‘the best time to post.’
May 9th, 2008 at 8:33 am
[…] Interesante estudio hizo la gente de AideRSS sobre cual es el mejor momento para publicar noticias y enviarlas a los sitios como DIGG aunque en realidad más que el mejor momento debería ser “el momento con más visitas en esos sitios” y descubrieron que es el miercoles al mediodía […]
May 10th, 2008 at 3:27 am
[…] lire : Third Rail, Read Write […]
May 10th, 2008 at 9:50 am
[…] Thursday at noon is the best time to post blog entries. Maybe I should have delayed publishing this by 3 […]
May 10th, 2008 at 9:57 am
[…] [BLOGGING] Thurday at Noon is the best time post and be noticed (PST), 3.rdrail.net […]