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%
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.
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.