Changes to Top Stories on Bitts
Any of you that follows Bitts on Twitter or Facebook probably know that every night at around 9pm ET, the top story of the day is posted just in case people may have missed it over the course of the day. Plus, it's no secret that people are usually online most in the evening or at night. Today I'm announcing some changes to the way Top Stories work. This is because I feel that subscribers of the site have the right to know that the Top Stories aren't based on simply what seems most popular, but it's what you guys clicked on and retweeted and what not.
Previously, a top story was determined by how many bit.ly clicks it received on both Twitter and Facebook. This served well for quite some time. But now that Bitts has grown a bit, nearing 2,000 subscribers soon, people have been viewing articles using other methods such as RSS or Google. Any of those clicks aren't counted into bit.ly, making this method of finding a top story inaccurate.
So starting today, Google Analytics will determine a top story because it counts in any single visit to a web page, regardless of how a person got there. It also will no longer matter whether that article was posted that day or not. The other day, one article had a lot of bit.ly clicks but was actually one of the least viewed articles of the day overall. So, hopefully this will be more accurate in choosing. If there's two articles with the same amount of pageviews for the day, then we'll go to bit.ly. If for some bizarre reason they both have the same bit.ly clicks, we'll go to retweets and so on.
Just a quick update to let all of you know that you choose the top stories and how that's going improve. Thanks!
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