If we were going to find out how much people valued the blog, the recent literature would suggest a number of strategies as well as asssessing satisfaction.
(i) A simple mechanism would be to count number of users times length of time stayed on and to place a time valuation using this
(ii) The blog is free and a public good and instead we could experiment with subscription charges (not planned!) to estimate a demand curve.
(iii) Rather than using an actual market, we could ask people hypothetically how much they would be willing to pay to subscribe to the blog
(iv) we could examine which brain areas are active when people are reading the blog (and see if these change if we pretend that the author of the blog is a nobel-winner!)
(v) We could randomly assign a group of people at time t in to a condition where they promise to view the blog each day and examine whether they are happier than a control group at time t+1.
(vi) We could set up a hurdle to getting in to the blog (e.g cumbersome log-in) and examine the effect on site-views.
(vii) We could get a population data-set from a Scandinavian country and examine whether birth outcomes of children born immediately before and immediately after the blog was available in this country were systematically different.
(viii) We could ask people the things that they value most in their life and analyse how the blog fares in the answers
Or i could simply get back to work!
2 comments:
Or, ask a ridiculous question and measure the sharpness of the response, so: How many of your children's kidneys would you give up to read this blog daily?
Then just measure the intensity of the flaming. We can call it social network textual troll analysis. Nobels for Kinsella and Delaney, please.
"A simple mechanism would be to count number of users times length of time stayed on and to place a time valuation using this"
My only fear with the above is that people may be reading blog content in their email accounts or throgh RSS feeds. But I'm sure we can control for the number of people that have subscribed to the blog...
All told, some very interesting ideas!
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