PhysicsWeb reported last month that a team of statistical physicists discovered through research that “the average half-life of a news item is just 36 hours, or one and a half days after it is released.”

What does this mean? Well according to the article:

The short life of a news item — combined with random visiting patterns of readers — implies that people could miss a significant fraction of news by not visiting the portal when a new document is first displayed, which is why publishers like to provide e-mail news alerts. The results also show that people read a particular web page not just because it looks interesting but because it can be accessed easily.

Although the average half-life varies for different types of sites, the decay laws identified are likely to be generic because they do not depend on content, but are mainly determined by a user’s visiting and browsing patterns.

So if your church offers weekly news and updates on its website but does not have a weekly newsletter, you may want to consider one to be sure that what you write is actually read. Also, are there any obstacles keeping visitors to your church’s website from easily accessing information?

Special thanks to Emergence Marketing for highlighting the research.