Popular Topics For Articles - An Analysis

Updated on April 12, 2015

I've been on Hubpages for a couple of years, some of which I've been relatively active. I've posted around 40 articles on a variety of topics. But which topics are the most popular? What tends to gather the most likes, and has relatively the highest number of comments?

To answer this question, I performed an analysis on the articles I have published on another website. Nothing too fancy, just a basic comparison of average number of views, likes and comments - per article and per category. The links to these articles aren't below (don't want to get penalized for advertizing another website), but you'll find their titles. Most of these articles I've removed and transferred unto Hubpages recently, so you can find them by going to my page here.

I created 8 general categories for my work, these being: Personal, Pets, Psychology, Writing, Quotes, Superstitions, Science, Various. I based these categories on which topics I tended to write most about.

Top 5

The Top 5 articles I wrote are, in order:

Reading Body Language: 74 views, 22 likes, 4 comments
How To Write Quality Articles: 62 views, 15 likes, 5 comments
How Do Relationships Develop?: 50 views, 13 likes, 3 comments
13 Quotes You Need To Read: 49 views, 13 likes, 1 comment
Using ASCII Symbols: 47 views, 15 likes, 3 comments

Next, let us take a look at which categories are the most popular, in terms of gathering views.

So What's Most Popular?

The analysis shows the most popular category is Psychology, followed closely by Writing.

This tells me that any articles on Psychology are good at drawing people to take a look. People are curious about themselves and others, and want to learn more. This finding is also reflected in the top 5: two articles of the 5 are from this category. It's a 'soft' science, with real applications in daily life, and we all in some form or another make use of it.

Writing is right behind Psychology. With an average number of 44.50 views, it's no surprise this can draw a crowd. This is a site for writing, after all. People want to know how they can improve their own articles and gather more views.

Next, we see Quotes and Personal trailing not far behind. Quotes are simple and quick to get through, while containing a lot of information. Personal... Well, people like watching people and reading about them. It's like getting a glimpse of someone's diary, or Big Brother in writing.

Superstitions, Science and Pets are next. These categories are more specific and will not appeal to everyone in the same way, so it's no surprise to find them slightly trailing behind. It's more specialized.

Last, but not necessarily least, is the Various category. Again, this makes sense. If you wish to be popular, it's always a good idea to have a field of specialty, something people will come to you for. Since the Various category contains mostly topics that I cannot put together with something else, these are things people will not tend to connect with me for, and so my audience expects different things from me.

That is not to say "Various" posts cannot be successful, but it's not a part of my "brand".Now let's take a look at the number of likes per category. I used "Percentage" for this part, because I don't want to know the absolute effect on Likes of a category, but compared to the views. After all, if you have a lot of views, it's easier to have a higher number of likes. You can't easily compare these.

What I wanted to know was, of those who looked at the article, who liked it?

According to the analysis, we can see that, although Psychology and Writing are the most effective in drawing views, they are not the categories that get the most likes. Rather, of those who actually clicked the title and viewed the article, by far the most "likes" are in Science, with Various following.

Personal, being rather high in the list when looking at pure number of views, is scoring pretty low when it comes to getting "likes".

What Can We Learn From This?

People will look at Psychology and Writing more easily, but will also quickly decide whether or not to read the entire article, so you need to quickly get their attention early on in the post. They will more quickly move on from the article. But when Science and Various get a view, they are more effective in getting a like. People who look at Science will be more likely to read the entire article and to then hit the "Like" - in so doing earning us money twice: a view, and a like.

People who look at Personal will probably quickly scan the article to see if it interests them, but since there is such a massive amount of personal posts out there, they have a very high treshold before reading the entire article and clicking like. It's more of a "fast food" treatment.And last but not least, how good are the different categories at getting people, who already clicked to view, to comment on it as well?

The analysis informs us that, while Pets is not very effective at getting views or likes, of those who read the article, most people will in fact leave a comment.

And it's not surprising. Pets is a topic that, for those who will be interested enough to click to read, speaks to the heart. It has an effect on people, and many people then love to share their own experience or talk about their pet, or leave information, or anything else that will result in a comment.

The least effective at drawing comments is Science. Science tends to be a topic that is more informative, and will not easily get people to say something, at least not on the website I made this analysis for. Same goes for Psychology, which is in itself another form of Science.

But since this is a writing website, people want to talk about writing, and so they'll quickly leave a comment on Writing.

Your Opinion

What do you think?

Now in line with this article, I have learned what to expect based on the topic I write about. Since this article is on the topic of Writing, I expect it to gather an average of 44.50 views. But I have to keep in mind that, as time goes on, I will have more connections. More connections + more time = more views. So, rather than an average of 44.50 views, I know I need to say "higher than 44.50 views".

Next, I expect it to gather up from 10.50 likes, again following the same reasoning. In the same light, I expect it to get more than 3 comments.

Why can I not be more specific in saying what amount of likes, views, comments I will get? Simple. Even though an analysis can tell you a great deal, the sample I am currently using to make my predictions is too small and unstable: as time increases, so will the viewer response. Thus I can only tell you the minimum of what this article will bring in to the fold.

So there you have it, a quick analysis of my articles and what we can learn from it. I for one surely did get some good insights from this, and I hope you did too!