[Infowarrior] - Online news dies after 36 hours

[Richard Forno]

Online news dies after 36 hours

Boffins work out the science of net news
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32938
By Nick Farrell: Tuesday 11 July 2006, 07:49

BOFFINS at the University of Notre Dame, in the US, have proved what most
newspaper journalists could have told them for the price of a beer, a web
news story will die after 36 hours.

Physicist Albert-László Barabási, working with a team from Hungary, had
thought that the number of hits on a news story would grow exponentially
over time as the story was distributed across the World Wide Wibble.

In fact they found that the number of people who read a news story on the
web decays with time.

Barabási is interested in studying the Web as an example of a "complex
network", with a topology that changes as new documents and links are
continually added.

The research reckons that a news site has a relatively stable "skeleton" of
documents which creates a cumulative number of visitors over time. But news
documents receive the most hits directly after their release, decrease with
time and are useless after just a few days.

The half-life of a news story is just 36 hours, or one and a half days after
it is released. While this is short, it is longer than predicted by simple
exponential models, which assume that web page browsing is less random than
it actually is.

This means that if punters do not visit the site for 36 hours they could
miss out on the news entirely, which is why some publishers have resorted to
RS Feeds or email alerts.

Most punters read a particular web page not just because it looks
interesting but because it can be accessed easily, the boffins found.

It does not matter how important or interesting a story is, if it is older
than 36 hours, interest in it will decay faster than yoghurt in a Saharan
summer. More here. µ