Is less than 15 questions per day an indication of an unhealthy beta?

Question

The Area51 page for the beta launches have this statement at the top "15 questions per day on average is a healthy beta". Most of the sites that have launched in the last 2 years are far from 15 per day. A few have periodic peaks but when you look are really averaging 5 or less per day, 0ne or two are doing spectacular.

Does less than 15 mean the site is not performing well? How do other criteria like visits per day offset new questions per day? For instance Pets is currently at 3.1 new questions per day and doing the math (1560/415=3.76) shows a pretty steady 3.75 questions per day, but it is getting 4500 visits per day which is 3 times the "1,500 visits per day is good"

I know there have been a few posts about not paying to much attention to the numbers. I also know there is a Next Generation of Area 51 that is expected...

Some of the numbers that are posted as the 'goals' just don't seem realistic. There are a lot of volunteers spending a lot of time supporting these proposals, can we get a bit more clear and realistic guidelines on the beta 'report card' pages?

Answer 1

Note: I put in a feature request to have that changed to 10 questions/day (pending dev approval) [UPDATE: The number of questions/day has been changed to 10!]. That (revised) number is based on a scatter plot of all our sites and where they seem to fall when the site becomes "rock solid" in their category.

No, that does not mean that <10 questions per day is a bad site. It simply means that there may not (yet) be enough for users to do on that site to hold everyone's interest in the long term. But a smaller or younger site can (and often does) tend to over hover in that < 10 questions/day zone for quite some time.

That doesn't really say anything about the site except that "they're not there, yet." This is purely observational, based on what we see across our network overall. When a site can maintain more than ~10q/day, that's when they seem broadly interesting to folks in that space for the long term. It's that "tipping point" I talk about in the post:

Does this site have a chance of succeeding?