How long do posts last on the front page of the internet? As mentioned last time, I snapped the front page of the internet (aka Reddit) once a minute for a few days because I thought the data might be interesting. In that post I charted the average rise and fall of posts from the depths of obscurity, all the way up to a top ten ranking, and back down to oblivion again. I thought it was pretty interesting, but to be fair, the real front page is those lucky posts that make a top twenty five ranking. So here is the question, how long can a post last on the front page?

The answer is anywhere from two minutes to a bit over twenty hours — twenty hours eight minutes to be as exact as I can.

The overall stats are at the left, the median time on the front page of the internet (only including those that actually make it!) is six hours thirty minutes, with 50% of posts (the inter-quartile range) lasting from around three to ten hours. The most successful subs (those with the most submissions that made it to the front page) are the next six plots in the middle. Interestingly they all have median values shorter than the overall median, which implies their success is relatively fleeting. Another interesting observation is that only r/funny has those little dots at the top — those are “outliers” and indicate values “greater than 1.5 times the inter-quartile range above the upper quartile”, i.e. more than 1.5 times the size of the box, above the top of the box. This gives an indication that popular posts to r/funny, while usually having a short life on the front page, can occasionally last disproportionately long up there compared to other successful subs.

Finally on the right is r/IAmA, the sample size is much smaller than the other subs plotted (n=10), but I wanted to include it because it just so happens (presumably by chance) that the min and max values for the overall data set (i.e. the post lasting two minutes and the post lasting twenty hours and eight minutes on the front page) both came from r/IAmA — “I’m the food critic that found area restaurants mislead on sourcing and “farm-to-table” claims AMA!” and “We are the investigative journalists who worked on the Panama Papers AMA!” respectively. And also just to prove the data might actually be correct — since r/IAmA is the only one plotted where the median is higher than the median for the whole data set :)

Want to see stats for your favourite sub? Any interesting data you would like to see extracted from this data set? Shout out in the comments!