Article Lifespan can be viewed as a coarse summary of a news property’s operation. It reflects the staffing level, processes, and strategy a news property has established to put out content at a particular rate. News Properties should align this as closely as possible to their readers’ reading habits to maximize readership while minimizing cost. I would argue that each new property has an optimal average Article Lifespan.

I personally tend to work with 5-8 Article Traffic Source segments when discussing data with news media publishers – sources like Search, Social Media, but also News Aggregators and News Originators. Some of these segments are de-facto defined by todays Web Analytics solutions, but News Aggregators and News Originators are rarely if ever included in that mix. The apparent black and white classification is achievable without much debate, but it is those news media properties on the fringes that need a proper rule set for classification, where one can prove whether it is indeed an Aggregator or an Originator.