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Comment by famousactress | Hacker News Reader

"our average time on site has remained steady at an impressive 15 and a half minutes"

Wow. I find this number pretty staggering, but I'm not familiar with traffic patterns on discussion & news sites. Can anyone who is weigh in with how this compares to other news or discussion sites?

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It's impressive when compared to, say, a news or review website. But it's not that impressive for a discussion forum.

I run several discussion forums, and average time on site ranges from 9 minutes (the one with least loyalty) through to fractionally over 17 minutes (the one with pretty good loyalty).

I'd be far more interested in knowing reddit's bounce rate and spread of recency and loyalty. Those are the killer metrics... just how obsessed are your users?

I'm pretty proud of one of my sites having a bounce rate of only 18%. Now that is a fairly unheard of number for a decent sized site.

Another site I run has over 26% of users having visited 201+ times. Loyalty off the scale.

What I've found is that it's fairly easy to build in a high frequency of existing users returning soon and of extending the time on the site, but it's much harder to build actual visitor numbers.

Basically communities have natural size limits before they crumble a bit, and reddit's magic sauce is subreddits and the ability to carry on pretending reddit is small when it's really large.

Our % of users who return 201+ times per month is over 30%

Here's some other Loyalty numbers for reddit (March - May 2011):

- Over 38% of our audience spend more that 10min per visit to reddit, Over 17% spends more than 30minutes per visit - Over 88% of audience visits reddit multiple times a day - Over 20% of our audience visit more than 20 pages per visit - New visitors to reddit account for 16.65% of our traffic & spend and average of 7:58 time on site - Returning visitors to reddit account for 83.35% of our traffic and spend an average of 17:31 time on site - Bounce rate is ~ 26%

For the size of reddit, that bounce rate is awesome. As are your loyalty numbers.

It's well known that forums are sticky, but your loyalty numbers confirm you're a gem.

It does remind of a discussion forum, and one of the problems with forums is display advertisers don't like paying to be on them. Perhaps it is high profile enough to escape this stigma? Such as attracting sponsorship deals for different categories.

On reddit that stat is inflated by each click taking so long to load. When I use reddit, I literally spend 30-40% of my time waiting for pages to load.

On the contrary, when I worked at reddit, we found that people allocate a certain amount of time to using the site (consciously or subconsciously) and the speed of the site doesn't seem to have much effect on that (unless it's completely unresponsive).

In other words, if they can read 100 threads in 15 minutes because things are running really smoothly, they will. If they can only read 50 threads in 15 minutes because things are under heavy load, then we would just get 50 pageviews from them.

TLDR: Slow reddit -> fewer pageviews, same time on site

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