Today is the 9th birthday of reddit’s oldest accounts, /u/spez and /u/kn0thing, reddit’s founders. Though reddit wouldn’t be publicly available back in 2005 for another Today is the 9th birthday of reddit’s oldest accounts, /u/spez and /u/kn0thing, reddit’s founders. Though reddit wouldn’t be publicly available back in 2005 for another 18 days , it seems like a good enough reason to celebrate with a blog post filled with statistics and graphs!

Video watching on reddit

You all love to watch video. In fact, 190 years of video are watched in reddit’s embeds every month. Embedly, who power reddit’s embeds, provided us with a bunch of interesting stats and graphs.

Depending on the video, people watch 50-80% on average of the total play time but the average isn’t nearly as interesting as the outliers.

/r/documentaries has perhaps the highest absolute average playtime of around twelve minutes but that works out to only about a quarter of its average video length. /r/movies on the other hand has both relatively long videos (around two minutes) and a high average playtime of about 75%.

Among the videos with high plays but a low fraction watched are an eight hour how-to video on the petaminx and a four-hour loop of the rooster from Robin Hood. On the other hand, everyone loved Mila Kunis sticking it to a reporter in Russian and the trailer for the new Disney movie Big Hero 6: the average person watched almost the entirety of each.



But what causes people to stick it out or leave a video early? We can look at heat maps to see what parts of a video people paid the most attention to.

For example, below is the heatmap for a video about how to make a yummy burger that people obviously found delicious and stayed with until the end:



On the other hand, this video called The Rolling Thunder stormed Washington, DC didn’t hold interest for very long:

Sometimes a part of a video is so interesting, you’ll go back and watch it again. In this video of a soccer player that has a heart attack and is then revived by an implanted defibrillator you can clearly see two peaks. The first is at 4 seconds in when the heart attack occurs, and another at 12 seconds when the defibrillator does its thing:

It’s also interesting to see how the title of a post affects how it gets watched. In this video titled “Steve Irwin made the best guest on the Conan show, it’s chaos at the end”, you can clearly see a dip in the middle where people skip ahead to the promised chaos:

If you found this interesting, then I have good news for you. Embedly are turning on a new feature that allows everyone to see this data. Just hover over any embedded video on reddit and click the “e” icon in the top left corner. For example:

The low-down on the new defaults

And now for something completely different. It’s been almost a month since we made somepretty big changes to the default list. Many moderators of smaller subreddits that were added have told us that there has been a noticeable improvement in the quality of submissions they’re now getting, and moderator teams have been working tirelessly to make sure things stay that way. It is great to hear that things are going so well, and, as always, we were extremely interested in seeing the raw data behind what these moderators have to deal with.

Below are some shmancy graphs that show the change in submissions per day, comments per day, and spam submissions per day that these new default subreddits have received. Ahigh-five to the first person who guesses which day we made them defaults!

This chart shows the approximate number of submissions that each subreddit gets per day. While every subreddit had a noticeable increase in submissions, a few subreddits gained a considerable number more.

This chart shows the approximate number of comments that each subreddit gets per day. Many of the discussion-based subreddits had a dramatic increase in comments. We love seeing redditors talking with each other!

Last but not least, this chart shows the approximate number of “spammed” links each subreddit gets per day. These could be posts that broke subreddit rules or posts that got caught by the site-wide spam filter. As is pretty apparent, these sort of posts are a large problem for default subreddits. Keep up the amazing work, mods!

We hope you enjoyed these graphs and remember — data IS beautiful!

discuss this post on reddit