Digging deeper in to how a title will impact your post here on Publish0x

By Patch | Things of note and other interesting stuff | 25 Jun 2022

I have been hinting at and teasing about this post for quite some time now. So I would say it is about time I actually deliver on it. I posted about this topic earlier. But this time I have been able to get a little more date to use so hopefully, it will mean we can figure out some things this time around.

Disclaimer, I have asked and gotten permission from Publish0x to de these kinds of experiments. And if you want to do something similar, I would highly recommend asking permission before doing it. In the worst case, it could get your account suspended.

The experiment in question

I have been given permission to repost my post here on Publish0x, and I have done so a few times. In most of the cases, I have changed the titles, in I think one or two cases I also changed the thumbnail. But I will go through and list the cases and then we can look at the date and try and figure out what is what.

The first post is the one I have experimented with the most. I have published it a total of 4 times. And here is the data:

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This is the data for the second post:

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Noticed I managed to swap the order of these two from how I sorted the data in the other two data sets.

This is the data for the third post:

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There is also a bit of extra data to go along with the second post. But unfortunately, due to me not being able to dislodge my thumb in time, it might be lost, lost in the sense that I can't show it, not lost as in I don't even remember it.

That date is when the views for the LUNa posts came. And how they came. For a long time, they did not get any traction. But then suddenly the second post from the top, the earliest one. Started to get views, and they came in chunks. So it started to pull ahead of the other post. The other post that I purposely gave a shorter and better name, just shows you what I know.

And I had basically written off the fop post of them, but suddenly it also came alive, gaining views in chunks or blocks. But then it died back down. The second one kept pulling ahead. So I pretty much had written of the top one with the shorter name when I went to bed. But the next day when I checked on them I saw something strange. Both of them basically had the exact same number of views, around 800 views.

But when I looked at the view graf I could see the first post, with the longer name had gotten basically all its views the same day. The second post had gotten a small number of views the first day and the last 600 the second day. While the first post basically did not get any views on the second day.

Can we draw any conclusions from the data?

I would argue that there clearly are some topics that are let us say a bit "finicky" and hard to attract readers too. For me, those topics tend to be topics regarding Faucets, NFT, and Play To Earn / Crypto Games. This means that if I want to get views on a post featuring that topic I better come up with a title that will get the attention of people.

If I look back at my posts about RollerCoin they tend to get around 250 views at the end. But the one post I did where I looked at if it was a good investment to invest in Rollercoin got more than double that, sitting at 584 views at the moment of writing. And the two-post with the second and third most views have both 342 and 341 views.

The conclusion I have drawn from that is that I obviously managed to attract more views when I talked about investing in the title in addition to just RollerCoin. If this is because with the addition it falls more in line with what my followers expect or if it attracts more people in general I cant say.

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Thinking, thinking...

If we now take a look at the four posts about faucets, they all appear to attract the same amount of views, with the exception of the last one. Where it clearly managed to attract a much greater number of views. The only thing that was different about it I would argue was the thumbnail. The two first posts both say it is regarding a Fauset on the thumbnail. But the third post only says "start earning a passive income". So no hint of a faucet there. The difference between the thumbnails is the one with the text features an empty wallet, while the other shows a lot of glittery goldish Bitcoins. So maybe the glittery Bitcoins attract more clicks? If not I have no idea, it is also possible that the post can be a statistic outlier. Meaning RNG plays a factor, and some post just performs better due to unforeseen circumstance.

Regarding the two NFT posts, I can honestly say I have no clue what one of them seemed to outperform the other. To me, those two titles are just as interesting. So it might be me that is missing something there, if you have any insight please share them.

The two LUNA posts appear to perform exactly the same initially, so that would be an indication of the fact that titles do not matter for these generally "popular" posts.

Summation

Titles only seem to matter for some topics. And these topics might vary for you. Why, because it might be due to the audience or subscribers you have managed to attract. If you post about primarily one topic then you will attract an audience that like that topic. As I started of posting about RollerCoin, I could assume that I had not very many followers back then, so as I gained more followers down the line they were not expecting RollerCoin content, but my normal all-over-the-place content.

The most interesting find for me however is the two LUNa posts, and how they were able to basically get the same number of views but how they got them was very different. And now when we add on more than a month of time we can see that in fact, my gut feeling appears to be correct. And the post with the better, shorter name. Have been able to attract an additional 200 views over 30 is somewhat days. While the 200 extra views are nice, I would still consider the LUNA posts to be a tick in the "titles do not really matter" collum. Especially for more generally "popular" topics.

It might very well be that thumbnails have a bigger impact on the success of a post than its title. But that needs to be experimented on further in order to be able to draw any conclusions. I will see if that is something I will look into more down the line, or maybe it is something one of you will look into?

And if you want to use some of my data in this post or in any other one feel free to do so. Just make sure to say where you got it and a link back or PM would also be nice, as it would be interesting to see what conclusions you can draw from it.

I hope that you have found this post to be interesting and informative to you. And if you have any thoughts or comments on this topic please share them in the comment section down below.

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