Some Data About Video Game News
[The above graph shows the percentage breakdown of each site's posts over a given 48 hour period]
A few days ago I had a thought; how much of the news we read online is from press releases? This thought built into me wondering what the breakdown in content is on the bigger sites out there. So, shovel in hand, I went to go dig up some data.
I’ll be wearing a white lab coat and going over the data properly very soon, but I thought I would post up this quick diagram showing my initial results. My method was simple (far too simple to point to anything conclusive). I took all of the articles published on the sites listed over a given 48 hour period, then categorized them accordingly.
Third Party articles are those news posts based on another site’s news post.
Press Releases are news articles based on something a PR firm has said/emailed.
Source means the article in question either doesn’t say where they got the news from, or is the source of the news itself.
Original Articles are those articles unique to the site in question. Be it a competition or feature.
Review/Preview are fairly self explanatory.
Just a quick look at the above graph (ranked in site popularity, most popular on the left) shows that roughly 75% of the articles we read are news posts which are either from another site, or press releases. This is about what I expected, and I don’t think it’s a particularly bad thing. I genuinely just find it all very interesting.
As I say, I’ll post more information about my method as well as the information gained from the data tomorrow, or whenever I’ve had time to properly go over it all.
I’m a stats nerd, w/e.
My God. I found this way more interesting than I expected. The amount of original articles must have some correlation with my enjoyment of the sites, because Joystiq is my least favourite, and My favourite is, well, see for yourself. But I don’t like Gamasutra so it most likely is pure coincidence.
An analysis of mainstream media (i.e. newspapers) would probably show similar results.
@OrangeGoblin: Yeah, I wish I had the time and ability to compaire these kinds of results (only with a larger sample) with things like the film or music industry. Maybe ever just general news.
I think there is a reason my favorites here a NG and Joystiq-they’re complete opposites. I also like x360a.org and gamesradar. I don’t enjoy to look at the same news with different fancy words.
@wardrox: I’m sure someone else has already done a study. I might have even read one, I’ll have a dig…
Interesting. Dtoid and NG have the most original articles.