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I am looking for way to measure the average engagement of users on various Stack Exchange websites and across time and probably the time spend on the site is the best way to measure the engagement.

How can I get this information or something close to it?

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This question has already been answered. 24 7 365. (We take leap days off.) –  Anthony Pegram Jun 27 '12 at 21:45
@AnthonyPegram: Maybe you do! –  animuson Jun 27 '12 at 22:04
One question: Why? I don't want my bosses to know how much time I spend here =) –  saluce Jun 27 '12 at 22:12
You all have too much spare time :) ... this is not for measuring the time of a specific user, is just for measuring the average time spent by all the users for a period of time. –  sorin Jun 28 '12 at 8:47
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1 Answer

"time spent" is not a metric available to us mortals, maybe (well, hopefully!) not even to the devs. I guess the best you can do from the data dumps is to extract

  • The frequency of answers
  • The frequency of comments
  • The frequency of edits

and interpolate some sort of activity index from them. Of course that is very hazy, because you'll have to guess how long a user needs on average to write an answer, for example ... Links could increase that time (because presumably, the user needs to copy&paste them from somewhere); edits over a short time span could drive the index up as well.

It's not much, but I think it's the best you can hope to achieve with the data available.

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The answer is going to be "too much" anyway. –  Bart Jun 27 '12 at 22:13
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