When I was a kid, I loved playing Trivial Pursuit. Unfortunately, my siblings did not.

I was often left to myself, reading and memorizing the questions. When I did rope someone into a game, I was assured not just of winning but also causing frustration that guaranteed I would be playing by myself for another six months.

All the facts and pieces of knowledge I've acquired during my young life have served mainly to impress (or annoy) friends over a drink at a bar. Think Cliff Clavin on Cheers.

Golden Rule of Analytics #1: traffic drops during the holidays. Those who follow news analytics know that it's a hard and fast rule that traffic peaks during election season and drops over the Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks. Why? Because the bulk of the audience to news sites is people goofing off at work.

Google Analytics

Pageviews to npr.org from iOS devices

And all rules are meant to be broken. So, you see that non-mobile (a.k.a. desktop) traffic dropped over the break – dipping as low as 29% below the week after Thanksgiving as expected. But wait, what are those blue lines reaching up and to the right? That's right, iPhone usage grew 94% over the holidays and iPad traffic tripled during the same time. As if I needed actual statistical proof that I'm the only person left in North America without an iPad.

And this means that...? Before we shutter further development on npr.org and devote all our energies towards creating a Very Merry NPR iPad App, keep this in mind – there's scale to take into account. While a 345% growth in iPad page views represents about 350,000 more pageviews per week, a 29% drop in non-mobile traffic is more in the 5M range. On the other hand, the holiday burst in iTraffic says something really interesting about these new platforms: they're filling those moments in our lives that are (from a pure analytics perspective) unacceptably devoid of screen time. When you think about it that way, perhaps a Very Merry NPR iPad App isn't a totally insane idea.

As a follow up to a post on mobile qualitative research, Jasper Lim reached out to me. Through this connection I learned about the conference on Market Research in the Mobile World. 2011 marked the second year of this conference. It should not surprise me that those on the cutting edge feel the need to splinter off from "traditional" research conferences at AAPOR, AMA, MRA but it is almost overwhelming to keep up. Nonetheless if you are up for the challenge, MRMW has kindly posted about 30 hours of video from its conference online, free to all. Enjoy here.

Lori Kaplan is the Director of Audience Insight & Research

The metro and streets of DC are quiet, but the restaurants are packed with holiday merrymakers. So it is the time of year that I think about getting out of town.

My kids are keen to head North . . . to the snow. I mentioned this wish to my family members living in Florida and I was greeted with blank stares followed by questions like, "Why would you want to do that?" I started to wonder if we are in our right mind or if there is something unique about my family.

Naturally I turned to Gfk MRI data to get a few US norms. It seems that listeners to public radio stations are more likely to take vacations – skiing, beach, national park. Given the audience's general interest in the world and typically higher levels of disposable income this finding is not shocking.

Now I want to be more specific because my risk-averse children are begging for a first-ever skiing adventure. A whopping 1.7% of NPR listeners took a cross-country or downhill skiing vacation last year and less than 1% of the US adult population has done the same. Of course some people do go skiing without taking a vacation. About 4% of NPR listeners went cross-country skiing and 6% downhill skiing last year. It looks like I have a small but mighty set of compatriots. Now on to packing the car with all of our toasty-winter clothes.

Happy Holidays from all of us here at Audience Insight & Research.

Lori Kaplan is the Director of Audience Insight & Research

Researchers take pride in providing answers to questions and explaining why. In this case, I have the answer, but cannot explain the why. So it's time for me take a step back and ask for some wisdom, insights and best guesses from our readers.

The question was simple enough: which day of the week has the largest broadcast audience for NPR News stations? Back in the diary days, ratings geeks determined that Thursday had the highest ratings, but this bump was largely explained away because Thursday was also the first day of the week for the paper diary. The thinking went that on the first day, diarykeepers were more likely to be thorough about recording their radio listening and less so at the end of the week.

Today, Arbitron's Portable People Meter can side-step that potential bias as meter carriers can start carrying the meter any day of the week. After some quick digging in Arbitron's dataset, I determined that in PPM-measured markets, audience ratings for NPR News-Talk stations during the recent Spring 2011 survey (an average of 12 consecutive weeks) peaked on Tuesdays – admittedly by only a small 1-2% margin over the weekday average.

Why Tuesday? If the programming is almost the same for each weekday, why would ratings peak for NPR News stations on a Tuesday? That's the question that I cannot answer. And maybe in this case, there is no specific reason why.

I dug deeper and found more surprises. On the commercial side for News stations, ratings peaked on a Thursday, and curiously for all radio – commercial, public, FM & AM, HD and streaming, audience ratings peaked on Friday.

Got any ideas? Please add your comments below.

Ben Robins is the Research Manager for NPR Programming.