Most shared content

What was the most shared piece of content across the six sites in the last month?
The data we've analysed is available as a GitHub gist

The following tweets were all shared by five of the six sites

There's a fat woman legging it around my house singing. I'm cracking open the passion fruit liqueur.

AHHHHHHHHHHH#bbcgolf

— P J Willett (@P_J_Willett) April 10, 2016

thanks for all the messages,could have been worse,bit of surgery going on now and be back very soon pic.twitter.com/UhM2TDC6Oh

— Kevin Doyle (@KevinDoyle1983) March 25, 2016

Brian O'Sullivan, if Brandon ever needs a fill-in, we're calling you! May we all have friends like this #farmersrule https://t.co/mENU0pGfHr

— The Killers (@thekillers) March 27, 2016

pic.twitter.com/mOyUA3rXjn

— TXFM (@TXFMDublin) March 30, 2016

"Not a bad maiden was he?" - Mouse Morris lost for words after training his first #GrandNational winner https://t.co/VxUcCoV0SK

— Channel 4 Racing (@Channel4Racing) April 9, 2016

Watch @shanelowrygolf make the sixteenth hole-in-one at No. 16 in #themasters history. https://t.co/YClo2d7xmW

— Masters Tournament (@TheMasters) April 10, 2016

As well as that the following two youtube videos were shared by four sites

Been a month

So it's been a month since I launched DoneWithClickbait and it's time to look at some of the numbers date mined by the site.
First of all, some disclaimers:

• the site didn't run correctly for a few days due to blocks by some sites - hello entertainment.ie and joe.ie - fortunately some volunteers helped me around this
• Due to the way some sites alter the way they share links, some articles have multiple entries on our database, one for each method (e.g. bit.ly or direct link) which skews the data a little. Fortunately these aberrations are rare so hopefully their influence on the final numbers is minimal
• DailyEdge and her.ie were not scanned from the site launch, so their total numbers are not exact, but the averages are still accurate

In the last month, the site tracked the links to 3996 posts across five sites - balls.ie, entertainment.ie, her.ie, dailyedge.ie, joe.ie and sportsjoe.ie

The data for each site is presented in the following format

Posts	Total number of posts for site
Posts Per Day	Average number of posts per day for the site
Total Links	Total links to articles posted by the site's twitter account
Tweets Per Post	Average number of links posted to each article
Most Linked Article	Article linked to the most by the site's twitter and the number of links

Balls.ie

Posts	833
Posts Per Day	26.8
Total Links	6166
Tweets Per Post	7.41
Most Linked Article	Five College Football Studs Who'll Be Earning Millions In The NFL By 2020 - 32

Entertainment.ie

Posts	557
Posts Per Day	18
Total Links	2546
Tweets Per Post	4.57
Most Linked Article	5 best things to watch on Netflix this week - 15

Her.ie

Posts	541
Posts Per Day	17
Total Links	4969
Tweets Per Post	9.18
Most Linked Article	A Celebration Of Irish Design At The Fashion Innovation Awards - 60

DailyEdge

Posts	319
Posts Per Day	10
Total Links	2546
Tweets Per Post	8
Most Linked Article	13 H&M shopping truths every Irish gal and guy knows - 29

Joe.ie

Posts	698
Posts Per Day	22
Total Links	8064
Tweets Per Post	11.57
Most Linked Article	VIDEO: This drug-fuelled Peppa Pig sketch is absolutely hilarious (VNSFW) - 67

SportsJoe.ie

Posts	1050
Posts Per Day	33.8
Total Links	10150
Tweets Per Post	9.66
Most Linked Article	WATCH: Emotional scenes in Croke Park as rival fans come together to remember Buncrana tragedy - 51

Analysing the text in each article's title has provided the following thirty most used words (minor words like the, an, who, etc are ignored)

Word	Occurances	Word	Occurances
watch	741	first	87
video	433	pics	83
irish	250	late	80
new	214	ever	75
pic	209	game	72
ireland	153	night	71
conor	148	tribute	71
dublin	145	today	69
fans	144	liverpool	67
ufc	137	football	66
mcgregor	117	manchester	66
last	102	star	66
people	99	rugby	65
day	97	world	65
most	89	him	63

Just outside the top thirty are league(63), twitter(63), against(62), show(61), diaz(60)

So what does this all mean? Anyone who follows these accounts is being bombarded with links to the same post multiple times, and the linked article is more than likely going to contain a video, which will have something with Irish interest. This really isn't too surprising given the sites are Irish, and trying to attract an Irish audience. With the recent high profile UFC bouts, it's no wonder that UFC, and McGregor, rank so highly, both well ahead of football and rugby - would this trend be repeated if the same search was applied in June after the European Championships, or in October in the latter stages of the Rugby World Cup?

Does the NFL article linked to more than any other by Balls.ie point to an increase in its popularity in Ireland?

I have to admit to being a little uncomfortable with the 51 tweeted links posted by SportsJoe.ie to the video of fans in Croke Park marking the recent tragedy in Buncrana.

Finally, I'd like to thank the volunteers who helped me work around the sites who blocked the twitter account

Done With Clickbait

I had an idea recently to write a script to rip the embedded content (tweets/facebook posts/instagram posts/etc) from the clickbait sites that have sprung up in Ireland over the last while (joe/sportsJoe/balls/etc) and publish it all elsewhere.

Been working on it on and off for a little while and you can see the results here: http://donewithclickbait.appspot.com/#/
Click on the headlines to expand and see what they have to used to justify an article. Might save you a few trips to these stites

There was a slight problem with the script for the last week where it wasn't updating for a few days, but I think I have it licked now

There's a few things left to do, the layout needs to be cleaned up for one thing, but it's more or less done. The site is updated a few times a day, and it all runs automatically from Google Scripts* The insults - "a waste of a journalism degree", "mouth breather", etc - are repeated so I need to think of a few more to make it seem less repetitive. Feel free to share the link to anyone you think would laugh at it.

I'm not the Irish Clickbait guy - https://twitter.com/IreClickbait - although you should follow him if you're on twitter. There is a twitter account for the site here - https://twitter.com/donewclickbait - but I haven't done anything with it yet. Again, something to work on. Maybe tweet when the article is first linked by the site, and then a running total whenever they tweet again - "joe.ie wants you to click on new article", "joe.ie linked to this article for the second time today", etc -

I'm doing some data mining on the articles as well, for the few days the site's been running I can tell you an article link is tweeted five times on average by those sites, with balls posting the most articles per day, and joe posting the same link the most times

If there's enough interest I could have a look at doing something similar for clickbait sites based in the UK, but I'm not as familiar with them.

*read up here if you're interested: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/triggers/