When nobody reads Habr

A long time ago, a hypothesis was born to me: “All IT people, like me, read news and articles at work over a cup of tea and coffee at the very beginning of the day and somewhere in the afternoon.”

To test this hypothesis (and not only for this, of course) last year I wrote and published a Habr monitor called Habr Pulse . Since hypotheses need to be tested, I started collecting data and analyzing the patterns of behavior of Habr-residents.



Today I decided to share the main observations.

Article structure:

1. Weekly peaks of activity and inactivity
2. Seasonal effects - New Year holidays.
3. Fundamental factors affecting behavior
4. The fall in the number of readers from the division of Habr
5. Poll: when do you read Habr?
6. conclusions

Weekly peaks of activity and inactivity

The pattern is the same every week, working days look about the same, and on weekends a sharp drop until Monday.

(deleted one point that arose due to technical lags)

Important : working days are virtually indistinguishable, on weekends readers are 3-4 times less than usual.

Freelancers can also work hours in Moscow, so their work cycles and Habr reading coincide with those in Moscow.

Seasonal effects - New Year holidays.

On holidays, there is a fall similar to a fall on the weekend. Sometimes the effect is even stronger than on regular weekends:



As we see, the number of readers on New Year's holidays is 4-5 times less than normal working days.

The number of articles (and views, and ratings, and favorites) also drops.
This is how the daily top looks in the evening of January 10:



And the lower part of the best for the day:



Long holidays often coincide with trips / trips and other recreational and recreational procedures, therefore they affect both the number of articles and the number of readers.

Important: During the holidays, habr read inactive and in fact no one writes anything, up to 2-3 articles in a daily top; for comparison: on Monday evening there are 45 articles in the top. Weekends on holidays are as deserted as all other holidays.

Fundamental factors affecting behavior

First, writing and reading articles are two completely different processes. Writing articles is a lengthy process that requires effort and time, so we often see a spike in articles on Monday and / or consistently appearing articles at night or in the early morning. People invest a sufficient continuous period of free time in writing an article and at the end of this segment lay out the material. It is logical that many write on weekends or finish writing at night, since it is at this time that most people have access to a sufficiently long continuous period of time to work on an article.

Second, reading Habré is an entertaining and cognitive process, therefore it is logical enough that the peaks coincide with the time of work breaks, or relaxation before the start of the working day with a cup of morning coffee.

Important: the number of readers throughout Habré weakly correlates with the number of articles (and, with rare exceptions, with the quality of a single article), because they are based on fundamentally different processes.

Many authors have a good idea of ​​the factors influencing the audience, so we can expect a peak of articles at the end of the holidays and the return of both categories home to the usual rhythm of life.

The fall in the number of readers from the division of Habr

In a post about winter changes on Habr, I asked a question about how the audience changed after splitting into Habr and Geektimes and even received an answer:



And as you know, the promised, they’ll wait three years (that is, two years later, I’ll still get access to Habra API). Instead, I offer my assessment of Habr's audience change.

Consider the chart for the month of July:


(chart from the Habr article, Step Syndrome and Habr attendance slice )

Comparing with the data for November (the division was in mid-October), we see that the decline is at the level of 25-30% . It would be interesting to look at the official data and see how the audience has changed, but unfortunately, they are not available now.

Poll: when do you read Habr?

To get a more reliable picture of what is happening, I decided to add a survey to find out when exactly the majority reads Habr and how often on weekends. This is necessary, since the collected data may not accurately reflect the real picture of what is happening, if enough people re-read old articles from favorites, for example at the weekend, then Habr’s Pulse will miss these views.

conclusions

If you want as many people as possible to read your article, then:

• do not post on the weekend - readers are three to four times less;
• do not post during the holidays - there are simply no readers, there are almost fewer than on regular weekends;
• any working day is suitable - Monday is not much different from Friday;
• before the holidays and weekends there are peaks, but they are insignificant.

- We continue to observe