Ask HN: How do you compute user lifespan?

Y	Hacker News new \| ask \| show \| jobs

1 points by siverson 5188 days ago

How do you compute user lifespan?

Seems like a simple question, but I've seen it done so many different ways and I'm now in the unique position of having a lot of great data (I think), but can't distill it to a good solid number.

For example, here is a link to the data for users that signed up for our service through a certain channel on 11/1/2011. A lot drop off in the first week, but then the rate of attrition slows.

Given this input data, what's the average user lifespan for these users? How do you compute that?

Thanks for any tips...

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/GegBR.png

XLS: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4278514/user_att_data.xlsx

1 comments

siverson 5188 days ago

Hacker News has failed me... :)

It's strange, I feel like I should know this, but there aren't any clear references on the web either (that I have found).

link