My neighborhood news site is doing well in the advertising department. I've written about my small (but growing!) ad revenue in the past. It's a testament to the Neighborlogs self-serve ad system and it's also a cool opportunity to study how small and local businesses behave in the local news advertising environment.

One anecdotal observation I have made on my own site is the seeming frequency of new advertisers starting on a Saturday. So I decided to take a look at the usage dataset from across all sites using the Neighborlogs service to see if the numbers line up with my observations.

Turns out, Saturday is, indeed, special when it comes to small, local businesses and self-serve advertising. The Day of Week bar graph below shows three measurements from the Neighborlogs network of sites. The blue bars represent activity by advertisers, the red bars represent all activity on the sites and the green bar represents the delta between the red and blue bars. The advertiser and all activity values are indexed so that 1.0 represents an average day of usage.

As my gut told me, there is a relatively huge amount of advertiser activity on Saturdays -- only the fourth busiest day of the week, yes, but, in comparison to the all activity measurement, the first day of the weekend is no day of rest for small and local businesses. No telling why from our dataset -- my assumption is that our small business advertisers looks at Saturday as a work day to catch up and get ahead. Meanwhile, I also assume that even though Tuesday is on the other end of the activity spectrum from Saturday, it's probably not because small biz owners are taking a break. Instead, Tuesdays are probably so busy, they don't have time to think about advertising.

But all of that is conjecture. For us, the takeaways are simple. Don't ship any key advertising system code updates on a Friday night. And be ready to answer the phone for all those small biz advertisers thinking about making the jump online while the rest of the world is enjoying the weekend.