When I worked at Stack Overflow, I was always interested in seeing how pageviews of questions on the site were distributed over time. Unfortunately, we only stored the current number of views of a particular question in the database, and it was impossible to find out the exact statistics of pageviews.
Recently I was interested in this same question again. How many page views does one question bring on average and for how long? How does this vary from community to community?
Tl;Dr;
An average question loses its relevance (it stops being viewed) three and a half years after publication regardless of language of the community but the absolute number of pageviews varies.
The Details
We will use Stack Exchange communities data. The problem is that it does not contain exact data on pageviews over time. What should we do?
The heuristic we will use to obtain the data is as follows. If we assume that all questions receive the same number of views on average, we can group the questions by publication date, calculate the number of days the question is on the site, and see how the number of views per question on average changes over time. To reduce the variability in the data from day to day, we will group them not by the number of days they are on the site, but by the number of weeks they are on the site.
This is what we get for Stack Overflow in Japanese
A similar situation can be seen on Stack Overflow in Portuguese
From the charts it is clear that at the very beginning there is a small jump, then a slow linear growth for about 200 weeks, then a plateau for another hundred weeks and then growth is starting again at about 300 weeks. Almost the same thing can be observed in other international communities!
In addition, let’s look at the number of views for questions that were asked less than thirty days ago. Below is the data for Stack Overflow in Russian
Here’s the data for Stack Overflow in Spanish:
I think, we can interpret the data as follows:
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On the first day after posting, a question gets viewed by the active part of the community. (That is, the number of “initial” pageviews on a question depends on the number of active users normalized by the number of new questions.)
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Then the question will be indexed by search engines and over the next three and a half years (200 weeks or 1400 days) it will gradually gain the remaining views.
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After three and a half years on the site, the number of views for the average question does not grow. The growth of views on old content occurs mostly due to outstanding questions. Moreover, the more time passes, the more likely that super-viewed questions will appear. For example, below is the absolute number of views on questions on Stack Overflow in Russian.
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It is also clear that all communities started with a set of very popular questions.
My main conclusion is that regardless of the community and absolute number of views, the average question loses its relevance after three and a half years.
This is a very important fact to consider when planning the development of your community.