Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Techcrunch titles are getting longer, but I don't know if that trend stretches out to the web at large.

So I did a quick survey of my blog ( http://www.puremango.co.uk ) which has been running for 6 years.

Here is a graph of the results: http://i.imgur.com/l2iKC.png

There's a slight upward trend, but I'm certainly not seeing as direct a correlation as there is on techcrunch (but then they have more data)

So perhaps this is the result of a particular editorial style rather than a wider trend. Worth investigating though.

If you have a wordpress blog, here's the SQL I used:

    SELECT post_title, post_date
    FROM `wp_PREFIX_HERE_posts`
    WHERE post_type = "post"
    ORDER BY post_date ASC
Then I just took it into excel with the following formula to count words:

    =LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1;" ";""))+1


If you're using MySQL, you can add the following:

    CHAR_LENGTH(post_title) as characters
AFAIK most SQL servers have some equivalent of a LEN() function.

Edit: Better yet, try something like this:

    SELECT left(post_date, 7) as month,
    ROUND(AVG(CHAR_LENGTH(post_title)), 0) as characters
    FROM `wp_PREFIX_HERE_posts`
    WHERE post_type = "post"
    GROUP BY left(post_date, 7)
    ORDER BY left(post_date, 7)
This will provide you an average post title length by month.

Edit 2: Incidentally, here's a chart of article and blog title lengths for articles and blog entries on a moderately well-read civic affairs website I edit: http://min.us/mvfTrxx


Perhaps you're not optimizing your titles as well as you could be....TechCrunch did just sell to AOL so they must know what they're doing!




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: