The long half-life of online news

How long does online news stay up to date? 36 hours. At least that is the result of research by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a physicist at the University of Notre Dame. The result is the result of the study "The Dynamics of Information Access on the Web". Another finding of the study is that users do not access the news spread out over the whole day, but rather in clusters over a shorter period of time.
Prior to the publication of the study results, a much shorter half-life of news timeliness had been expected - most estimates were between two and four hours. The Barabasi study was based on tracking every click of every single visitor to the Hungarian news and entertainment website Origo.hu.