Starship Asterisk*

That’s a try to answer the question, but only based on Catalan translation APOD mirror site.

CLICKING USER’S BEHAVIOR ON APOD IN CATALAN APOD

External links: those which target to pages which are not part of Catalan APOD web site.

Internal links: those which target to pages which are part of Catalan APOD web site.

Premises:
- None of the user behavior analyzer systems is perfect. To be strict, I should use three analyzer methods.
- I just refer to Google Analytics, which uses only one of these three methods.
- Therefore, the below conclusions aren’t 100% reliable.

I analyzed a window of time between June 1, 2009 and May 31, 2010, to get data from pages present on the web during a period of time long enough.
Until now I had checked only external links:

- Links to non-APOD pages.
- Links to APOD pages previous to year 2002 not translated into Catalan. In these cases, I link to APOD English page.
- Links to the image itself. Its target is the image’s highest resolution version, hosted on English APOD web site and therefore, it’s an external link.

Obviously, an important difference between English APOD and its Catalan version is its language and furthermore, the language of the links’ targets.

The links to pages in Catalan are:

- Links to Wikipedia in Catalan (external links).
- Links to APOD pages translated into Catalan (internal links).

Despite I don’t like that, during 6 months I highlighted the links to pages in Catalan (including those external to Catalan Wikipedia), with brown color.
I didn’t found that users were clicking more on these links, so finally I don’t highlight links to pages in Catalan.

Right now I only highlight links to multimedia resources (watch two of these links on http://www.apodcatala.com/1006/apod100614.htm).

Results:

Usually the users do no click on the links.

From 235,793 pages visited, only 16,770 links were clicked.
The five more clicked links have only:

1st - 156 clicks
2nd - 95 clicks
3rd - 80 clicks
4th - 73 clicks
5th - 69 clicks

Besides, 81 of the top 100 more clicked links are to the image itself, not to links contained in the explanation’s text.
The averages of time spend by the users watching all highest resolution images are 49 seconds.
But on the top 71 images more clicked, the users spend more than 1 minute of average time.
The first one has an average of 5 min 5 sec.

I ask myself if the users watch these images or, actually, download them.

Right now I’m testing that hypothesis relating: time on the link, size of the high resolution image and even typology of the image (deep sky, planetary…).

Links which don’t have the image as target:

I excluded the links to sites corresponding to International Year of Astronomy 2009:

http://www.astronomy2009.org/
http://www.astronomia2009.cat/
http://www.astronomia2009.es/

The ten more clicked links are:

1 - 2009 July 12- “A Cosmic Call to Nearby Stars” - 95 clicks
“(The solution is here.)” - http://library.thinkquest.org/C003763/p ... view01.pdf
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090712.html

2 - 2010 April 27 - “The Bloop: A Mysterious Sound from the Deep Ocean” - 50 clicks
“a loud and unusual sound, dubbed a Bloop” - http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents/acoustic ... /bloop.wav
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100427.html

3 - 2010 April 27 - “The Bloop: A Mysterious Sound from the Deep Ocean” - 33 clicks
“and was audible 5,000 kilometers away.” - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TzZCL-u46Q
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100427.html

4 -2010 April 23 - “SDO: The Extreme Ultraviolet Sun” - 31 clicks
“include a high-resolution movie of the large” - http://www.youtube.com//SDOmission2009
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100423.html

5 -2009 July 20 - “Apollo 11: Onto a New World ” - 30 clicks
“NASA has released a digitally restored video” - http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/hd/apollo11.html
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090720.html

6 - 2009 June 1 - “Spirit Encounters Soft Ground on Mars” - 30 clicks
“the five year old mechanical explorer.” - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UmRx4dEdRI
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090601.html

7 - 2009 September 13 - “The Holographic Principle” - 28 clicks
“claim to see a teapot.” - http://www.teapots.net/
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090913.html

8 - 2009 June 11 - “Pyrenees Paraselene” - 26 clicks
“but colorful moondog or paraselene.” - http://www.atoptics.co.uk/halo/parmoon.htm
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090611.html

9 -2009 October 20 - “A Solar Prominence Erupts in STEREO” -25 clicks
“can be found here.” - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RjswBx6ysQ
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap091020.html

10 - 2010 January 20 - “The Known Universe” - 23 clicks
“to the famous Powers of Ten video” - http://www.powersof10.com/
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100120.html

- Most of them are links to videos which, as I said before, I highlighted.
- The link number 7 is amazing. I don’t find any explanation.
- There are two links to 2010 April 27 APOD. In fact, it’s one of the most clicked texts, maybe because it is an unknown and non-astronomy topic and it has 4 multimedia links:
http://www.apodcatala.com/1004/apod100427.htm

- Anyway, the number of clicks in all cases is very low.

To be continued… I hope.
Any help will be welcomed.
Thanks.
Joan Gironès

Interesting, thanks Joan. You said the 2010 April 27 APOD was the most clicked, overall. Do you have the top ten on that? How about APOD views, which seemed to be the most popular? Owlice is our statistics junkie, she might be interested in your techniques.

Joan is one of the original Asterisks and is the administrator of the Catalan language APOD mirror.

Welcome back, Joan! Don't wait for another anniversary.

Look, geckzilla, her site adheres to W3C standards. Think that will make any difference to RJN?

bystander wrote:Interesting, thanks Joan. You said the 2010 April 27 APOD was the most clicked, overall. Do you have the top ten on that? How about APOD views, which seemed to be the most popular?

Hi,

I just can talk about Catalan APOD. I have some data, but I still must to check them.

Anyway, you can use a popular method, no rigorous at all, for original APOD: type on Google search window ‘site:apod.nasa.gov’.
If you exclude the first result - the index page - you’ll watch a rough popularity ranking. Actually very rough, because if you type 'site:apod.nasa.gov' the results are different.

Obviously, every search engine shows different rankings; therefore you can only get a great picture of popularity ranking.
You also can try the same way by searching APOD images.

Best regards,
Joan