How to compare longevity with productivity?

January 28, 2013 11:30 AM

I have a Soundcloud account. I think it's among the better sound file sharing sites, but it can be a little pricey. I am regularly adding new content so I am always butting up against the file size limitations of my account. So, I want to have a way to look at the files in my account and decide which of them needs to go and keep the most productive ones. I want to be able to compare how long a file as been posted to number of times it has been viewed. I think that deleting a file based just on duration or views could be deceiving because I could delete an old account that is delivering consistent viewers while a new account that starts out fast could drag as time goes on. I can't tell that by just looking, so I need some help. Can I create something in Excel? I also have SPSS. Would creating crosstabs help?
posted by CollectiveMind to Science & Nature (4 answers total)

Sounds like you want to look at the number of times a given track has been played in the last month (or other arbitrary length of time). I don't have Soundcloud, but I assume you can pull up total views for everything on the account. If you do that once a month and dump the data in an Excel sheet, you can subtract last month's numbers to find out how many recent views each track has. Sort by that column and find the bottom 10% (or some other fraction), then delete those.

Unless you had some more complicated measure of popularity in mind?
posted by echo target at 11:46 AM on January 28, 2013

Excel will definitely do what you need here, but the real question is how do you decide what to keep. In your question, you started to explore that, but so far it doesn't sound like you know exactly what you want to measure.

For exploratory data analysis, you might want a tool like Tableau. You can import a CSV with your data and start exploring the data. It's pretty expensive, but there's a free version (public) and the pay versions have trials.

Once you know what you want to measure, creating a spreadsheet to calculate the popularity/staying power/views per day weighted by country/whatever is not too tough.
posted by heliostatic at 12:38 PM on January 28, 2013

Response by poster: For now, this might work. To find an underperformer, I can for example, add up all of the times that all interviews that have been up for two months have been played (50). Divide the number of interview plays by the number of interviews (3) up for those two months and I get an average of plays per interview per month (16). If any interview is below that average, that interview gets deleted.
posted by CollectiveMind at 3:10 PM on January 28, 2013

Response by poster: Whoops, made a mistake that I fixed.
posted by CollectiveMind at 3:11 PM on January 28, 2013