Can you judge the success of a post on Publish0x simply by looking at its initial number of views?

By Patch | Things of note and other interesting stuff | 22 May 2022

I have been slowly collecting some data on my own posts in order to see if it is possible to gauge how a post will do over time. Simply by looking at how it is doing during the initial hours after it gets published.

The data

I have collected data from 29 of my posts, their subject matters vary, just like the post I publish. But I have tried to collect the number of views after 1 hour and after 2 hours of the post going live. I have however messed that up a few times. So in some cases, I have the views after 3 or 4 hours. And in some cases only after 1 hour. And sure that is not ideal, but it is what it is. =(

I have also collected the number of views a post currently has. And so far I have no post that is getting any significant amount of views after the initial 24 hours. So while the end views are slightly skewed in favor of posts that have existed longer. I would argue that this more than enough is compensated by me getting better at writing as time goes by as well. So newer posts are more likely to get slightly more trickle in views.

My excel skills can use a refresher course, I know... And in case you wonder, post #10 was a duplicate, so it is removed because of that.

Analyzing the data

So when we start to look at the data we can see that the views are all over the place. So in order to be able to make any type of sense of them we first have to rearrange them in sets. I have here rearranged the posts according to their final number of views. Below 500, 500 to 1000, and above 1000. And it just happens to be a completely even spread.

Sadly I am unable to see any pattern in these subsets. Or by looking at the data at all. I really have to say that I was disappointed by this.

I think that the divergent points for the posts must happen at a later time than in the first two hours. Not even getting over 100 views in the first hour is any indication of the post even being able to get above 500 views. And the same goes for having a low number of views after two hours. Two of my posts have 36 respective 51 views. But they still were able to end up with over 1000 views when all was said and done.

I also have looked at the average number of views for my posts for 1 respectively 2 hours. But those numbers did not indicate anything either. In case you are wondering they were as follows: <500: 74,8; 101,6 and 500-1000: 86,9; 126,5 and finally 1000+: 87,1; 112,9.

Adding time to the mix

As the first analysis was unable to reveal any trends I have gone back over the data and now added the time of publication to every post as well. Let us now take a look and see if we can spot any patterns. I have rounded the times to the closest 15 min, in order to have a more manageable data set. Probably rounding to the closets 30 min would have been enough as well.

Sadly adding time has not reviled any significant trends. The only hint of a trend appears to be that my posts that go up in the evening or night look like they have a slightly better chance of doing well.

To sum things up. Looking at the number of views a post gets the first 2 hours after publication is not a good indicator of whether the post will go on and do well after 24 hours have gone by. Probably the influx of new views stops sometime after the two initial hours.

I am also not able to see any clear patterns regarding whether the time of publication matters for the success of a post.

In order to be able to find any patterns, I probably need a much bigger data set, and optimally data that covers a post more thoroughly over time.

I hope that you have found this post useful, despite my failure to draw any solid conclusions. If you would like to use this data and make your own analyses of it feel free to do so. I have added a link to the google dock where I put it all down below. Just make sure to credit me as the source. I will also save my raw data (which consists of screenshots) and if you would like to axes that reach out to me and I am sure we can make that happen.

If you would like to share your data with me, please leave a comment down below. I would really like to be able to get my hands on more data.

I hope that you have found this post to be useful and hopefully to some help for you. =) If you did please consider following me, reading my other posts or why not do both. You can find them here and here.

I have also just started a new series of weekly posts, that will go live every Friday. You can catch the second step here: