How Many JetPunkers Are Awake at Different Times of the Day?

Many people are aware that the time of day you release content on JetPunk can make a difference, and that it is recommended to optimize the time of release if possible. In fact, I already made a blog back in 2024 that covered this topic and provided rough estimates of user activity on the website. But in this blog, we will be doing a more in-depth analysis of the number of users who are awake during different times of the day, taking into account various factors like user demographics, time zones, daylight saving, and the day of the week.

Note that we will be analyzing the number of "awake" JetPunk users. Being awake does not equal being active on the site, though they are related. However, the latter is more difficult to accurately estimate and therefore will not be used in this blog.

To provide a fairly accurate estimate of the number of awake users during different times of day, we need to take several factors into account.

This should be an obvious one - where do users come from? We need this information because different places make up different proportions of users and observe different time zones. Thankfully, there is already a JetPunk quiz that provides exactly this information. Now, you might say that the quiz doesn't cover all countries. Correct, but just the top 20 countries should be "good enough" for us to produce a reasonable estimate of the number of awake users, given that those countries combined cover almost 86% of the site's user landscape.

The top 20 countries and their user percentages are as follows:

We will need this information later, as we start to factor in time zones and daylight saving - which are different from country to country.

Another obvious factor we need to consider - different countries are located on different slices of the planet. The standard time zones (not daylight-saving time zones) of the top 20 countries are as follows:

Note that some countries observe multiple time zones. For those countries, we will naively assume for the sake of simplicity that each time zone houses an equal number of people in the country.

But time zones alone are not enough. Remember some places change their clocks twice a year? Yeah. We need to take that into account as well. This also means that the data will be different depending on the season.

This is a more easily overlooked but still significant factor (I ignored it too in that blog from 2024). But this time, we will not ignore it and we'll take it into account.

Different countries can have wildly different DST schedules, but the general pattern is that, in countries that observe DST, the clocks are turned forward an hour during local summer.

The following countries from the top 20 observe DST during Northern Hemisphere summer: United States, France, United Kingdom, Poland, Germany, Canada, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland, Austria.

Australia is the only top 20 country that observes DST in Southern Hemisphere summer. However, western Australia (UTC+8) does not observe it, and we'll take that into account as well.

Another less obvious factor. More often than not, people wake up and go to bed at different times depending on the day of the week. This can be difficult to predict, but for our purposes, we will use some reasonable assumptions of people's waking hours. Specifically, we assume the following:

✓ Waking hours from Monday to Thursday: 8 AM to 10 PM;

✓ On Friday: 8 AM to 11 PM;

✓ On Saturday: 9 AM to 11 PM;

✓ On Sunday: 9 AM to 10 PM.

Now you may be asking: "How can I derive the number of awake users, given all the information?"

The process is quite simple: for each hour of the day, find which countries (or parts of countries) are awake, and then add up the total user percentages in those countries.

To make the calculation process clearer, I will now show you an example. This example covers all 24 hours of a Sunday (UTC) in Northern Hemisphere winter (Southern Hemisphere summer).

Countries by time zone:

% of users in each time zone (add up percentages in individual countries):

Waking hours highlighted in green. Note that it may be Saturday, Sunday or Monday locally, depending on the time and time zone. Percentages are obtained by adding up user percentages of all highlighted time zones in each row.

Data are presented as charts to reduce clutter.