Hey there, journalist here with 20+ years experience in the news industry, including 10+ years in digital news. To fairly consider the “prevalence” of news stories and how they progress in the news cycle you’d need a much bigger dataset. Right now, as you’ve described it in other comments, a more accurate title for this chart is: “How the top 10 articles were curated and ranked on homepages of 64 U.S. general interest national(?) news sites when the researcher looked at them.” Correct?

That can still be interesting data, but it doesn’t truly reflect the which stories are most “prevalent” in the news.

Know that news website homepages are one of a few (many?) places people consume news online. Google Analytics, which many news organizations use to track success online, reports acquisition channels as Search, Social, Referral and Direct. The percentage of users that see or are delivered (“prevalence”) and consume news via each channel varies by news organization, but a news org with a legacy brand will get a healthy percentage of traffic from each. People that come to news homepages are a subset of Direct traffic, which also includes users who just type in Mylocalsite.com/weather, for example.

Direct traffic also can include visitors to news organization mobile apps, which can be curated differently from website homepages. Direct traffic does not include people who read push alerts from mobile apps but don’t click through, and what those folks see also should be considered when determining the “prevalence” of news stories online. Referrals, meanwhile, can include visitors who click through from news organization email newsletters, which are often written and curated differently from homepages.

So the stories “prevalent” to U.S. news consumers can be different based on the platform on which they’re delivered news.

That brings us to Social and Search, both of which send healthy traffic to U.S. news sites and play a noteworthy role in determining the “prevalence” of news for Americans. Pew research reported in September indicated that 50% of U.S. adults get news from social media sometimes or often. 82% of American adults use YouTube; 25% of those users say they regularly get news on the site. 70% of American adults use Facebook, and 31% of those users regularly get news on the site. 30% of American adults use TikTok, and 10% of those users regularly get news on the site.

So to really track and report the “prevalence” of news stories, you’d also need to track and report which stories are delivered and consumed on social, and that delivery is determined in large part by social network algorithms powered by user behavior. Which is in part how we get vertical communities on social (“BookTok,” “Black Twitter.”) The prevalence of news stories in those communities can be community-dependent.

For Search, the good news is that data on what news stories people seek out and are delivered is available from Google Trends. That said, I’d suggest reading the Google Trends help docs before digging into and reporting that data. You need to know what relevance means to Google when looking at those numbers.

Those are just the differences in digital formats that need to be considered when researching the “prevalence” of news stories. We haven’t even discussed that to really measure “prevalence” you’d need to consider what’s in print editions and broadcast newscasts, both of which still help determine the news agenda for the country. We haven’t discussed the role that consumers play on setting the agenda - the number of people clicking on a story on other acquisition channels helps determine if that story is ranked on a homepage, and for how long. And we didn’t discuss the fact that some news organizations are testing personalization of homepages powered by machine learning. What you see on a news homepage can be unique to you and based on how cookies tracked your habits across the web. It might be different from what other visitors see.

It’s also worth noting that 64 news sites may not constitute a useful sample. At a minimum, in the top 100 DMAs in the U.S., there are typically at least four broadcast news websites and one newspaper of record website. That’s 500 local sites that determine the prevalence of news in the U.S. just in the top 100 DMAs. There are 210 Nielsen DMAs in the U.S. Many of those DMAs also are home to hyperlocal startups and alts which also should be considered when tracking and reporting the “prevalence” of news stories. What’s prevalent to people in Cleveland will be different from what’s prevalent to people in Memphis, which will be different from what’s prevalent to people in L.A., etc.

And that’s just the U.S.

That’s not to say that there aren’t worthwhile data-based stories to tell about news consumption and delivery in the U.S. It’s always interesting to learn more about how specific stories are presented by different news organizations on a specific market. You also could subscribe to a bunch of different newsletters and report on what they present, given that newsletters are static. Google Trends data from the previous day also is static.

Here’s the source of the Pew data about news consumption on social: https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/social-media-and-news-fact-sheet/

Hope that’s helpful!

I don't like it. It is a case where correlation does not imply causation. The fact that there are fewer pharmacists does not necessarily mean that people have more/less access to medication. The most significant factor is the wealth of the average person and their lifestyle.

I'm not suggesting that method as a good strategy. I'm suggesting it as a comparison to show the benefit of DCA is a simple, unbiased way.

It won't show a huge advantage in this case, because the main story on Tesla stock was the several huge increases. Where it shows a clear advantage is when a stock has a generalizing trend, but has a lot of volatility.

If you want a comparison to what a naive investor might do instead of dollar cost averaging, rather than a neutral alternative like what I suggested, it could be that each month you put $100 into your bank account, and then look at what the stock did over the past month. If it's been steady, you invest $50. If it's been rising gently, you invest $100, and it it has been rising rapidly, you invest everything in your bank account. And if it has been falling, you invest nothing.

Chinese guys have their own platforms and they don't speak English that often.

I'm more surprised that there are more Germans than Indians.

if you take the most popular letter that hasn't been used yet, you get:

ANELISORY

Incomprehensible graph format

It took me a good minute to realize that you didn't mean life expectancy of pharmacists.

The fact that the data is for desktop traffic only makes me think that that developed countries are overrepresented by this chart. The majority of social media traffic comes from mobile, making this data even more questionable.

For example, a 2017 study found Indians accessed the internet 80% of the time through mobile devices.

Data: World Bank Data for Life Expectancy. For Pharmacists Per Capita: https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/pharmacists_per_1000_people/

Tools: R, ggplot

Note: Relationship holds in panel model controlling for GDP Per Capita, with both fixed and random effects

I figure it's kind of like YouTube. There's a presence but a small presence of Chinese on YT since they have their own platform for it.

i wonder how it's checked, like if people use VPNs

also only desktop traffic and isn't a lot of users mobile only?

I may try to chart your suggestion. Since I'm new at this, I was trying to figure out how DCA affects your investment, but as others wrote, if the stock only goes up LS will win every time. I just learned what is obvious to more experienced people. Edit:. Is there a real world way to make a fair comparison? Your method only works in hindsight.

A more interesting comparison might be to invest $1,200 a year, two different ways. One would be to invest $100 a month, and the other would be to look at the average share price over the year, figure out how many shares $1,200 would buy you, and buy 1/12th of that each month. That way you'd be still investing your money over time in a similar way, but you'd be missing out on the specific benefit of dollar cost averaging of buying more shares when the price is low and fewer when it's high.

All your showing here is that starting to save for retirement early is better than doing it later.

DCA: you're making a mean by investing every day

LS: same as last value

so if last value is higher than first, LS wins

When it comes to English, Danish (I'm Danish) or Spanish i don't think there's any words originating from these languages where Q isn't followed by a U.

I tried googling Q words and all words i found where it wasn't followed by a U, was Arab surnames, Arab or asian words. Qi for an example. Albanian currency is called Qintar.

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Interesting. I thought the majority would be China.

Couldn’t have broken down that 30% of “other” to anything else?

Newbie here. Can you explain?

Interesting! I haven’t thought of that.

Latin had the same Qu thing, so perhaps it’s only common among the Latinate languages.

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Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA/history?period1=1280620800&period2=1674950400&interval=1mo&filter=history&frequency=1mo&includeAdjustedClose=true

Made with Excel

The previous post about Tesla stock got me thinking about the different possible investment strategies.

Only words i can think of that doesn't have U after Q is Qatar or Qaeda.

Maybe more common in Arab languages?

That's right, the labels can change over time as the discussion shifts. GPT-3 does the labeling and I manually adjust it, if necessary. Occasionally, the stories themselves can split or combine.

In school we learned Q is married to U