At work I finally got around to doing a project I’ve been wanting to do for a long time: analyze the sharing behavior of a year’s worth of content at Mashable.
It’s no small project. First, a year’s worth of Mashable content must be collected, which ended up being 13,979 articles in total. Next, the author, publish date, headline, and full text of each post must be extracted from each page, which requires a (fortunately simple) custom scraper to be built. Next, the social resonance data of each article must be collected. For this analysis, I collected share counts for Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest, plus clicks from Bitly and per-article submissions from Reddit. Continue reading “A Year of Mashable — 2012”