An Associated Content Experiment: Time Sensitive Articles Vs. Non-Time Sensitive Articles

Some writers on Associated Content might wonder why some of their articles are not accepted or why their articles are not getting page views. One of the reasons might be that your articles might be time sensitive, meaning that the topic or your articles will only be important for a certain period of time.

I write a lot of sports articles so I'll use two of my articles as examples. Last year I wrote an article about why Justin Morneau should be the American League MVP. This article might get page views for the rest of the season but once the American League MVP was awarded this article is no longer relevant to anybody.

My article about the Best Walkoff Homeruns in Division Series history will always be an article that will be relevant as long as I live because those walkoff homeruns will still exist. Unless I somehow get sucked into a portal to an alternate reality or something.

I decided to do a little experiment and see just how well non-time sensitive articles do compared to time sensitive articles.

I went through all of my articles, divided them between time sensitive and non-time sensitive to find out which type of article is more likely to get accepted, which gets higher offers and which gets higher page views.

More Likely To Get Accepted
Let's start with which one is more likely to get accepted. As I went through my articles I discovered that I have 353 articles that are time sensitive. Out of those 353 articles only 262 received upfront offers. That means 74% of my time sensitive articles received an upfront offer.

I also had 452 articles that were not time sensitive. Out of my 452 articles that weren't time sensitive 406 of them were accepted. That means that 89% of my articles that weren't time sensitive were accepted.

Average Upfront Offer
As I said before I had 353 articles that were time sensitive. If I add up my total upfront payments for all of those 353 articles it totals $1457.96. That comes out to just $4.11 per article.

I had 452 articles that weren't time sensitive and they totaled $2526.32. That comes out to $5.58 per article.