What Is the Best Time of Day to Release JetPunk Quizzes?

This website has countless small quiz-makers desperate for takes. Many of them are struggling to pick up more takes and raise their Quizmaker Rank, despite spending possibly many hours of their time and tons of efforts making quizzes. However, those quiz-makers may not necessarily know that the time of day they release their quizzes actually influences how many people will notice them, and consequently how many takes they will get. In this blog we'll go over why that's a thing, and try to establish the best time for releasing quizzes.

Now you may be asking: "Why does the time of day matter at all, can't I just release quizzes whenever I want to?"

Yes, you sure can, but it's highly recommended that you release your quizzes at the optimal time of day, or "prime time". There are two reasons to this:

- First, loads of quizzes get released each and every day, most of which will appear on the "Recent User Quizzes" page very briefly before getting their spots replaced by newer quizzes. This means that the first few hours is likely the best time for new quizzes to pick up takes.

- Second, more people are active on JetPunk during certain times of day. Most of JetPunk's traffic comes from Europe and America. Obviously you don't want to release quizzes when people living in those regions are sleeping, given that there is a very limited amount of time for new quizzes to get noticed.

The "best" time is not all that easy to determine, as it is affected by various factors. But the following are a few points to consider, based on my personal knowledge of the site as well as my own experiences:

- First of all, as I mentioned earlier, it's probably not a good idea to release quizzes when the majority of users are sleeping. This means that normal sleeping hours in Europe and the United States should be avoided.

- Secondly, although many people (including myself) don't want to see this happen, many users play quizzes while procrastinating at work or school. This implies that the working hours can be a good time for new user quizzes, but it involves a degree of uncertainty (since you can't say for certain how many people would be procrastinating).

- Thirdly, as far as I know, more people could be on the website in the evening, after finishing the day's work or school. What this means is that the evening hours could well be the "prime time" for new quizzes to be taken.

- The best time of day to release quizzes may also vary with the day of the week in question. During weekends, there may be a tendency for people to fill their daily routine with other forms of entertainment than JetPunk (which explains why traffic is generally lower on weekends), so it's probably less than optimal to release quizzes on Saturdays and Sundays, regardless of the time of day. Although, obviously, releasing quizzes during waking hours (in Europe and the US of course) is still preferred over releasing them at nighttime.

Below is a table listing the hours of the day, each of them given a score based on my personal opinion of how "good" it is for new quizzes, taking into account the above. Note that some of these scores are presented as ranges, due to uncertainty over the extent of procrastination during work/school hours. Two local times are listed for each region due to Daylight Saving Time. The table is valid only for weekdays (Monday to Friday).

From this table, it's not hard to see that the interval between 16:00 and 21:00 UTC is perhaps the best time or "prime time" for new quizzes to get noticed and taken by people.

Note that the 16:00-21:00 UTC interval is not necessarily the best time for "releasing" quizzes, for a simple reason. That is, new user quizzes will usually stay on the recents page for at least a few hours, which means that what matters most is not the point in time of quiz release, but the hours immediately following that point.

Confused? Let's look at an example. Say you released a quiz around 20:30-21:00 UTC, which according to the table is within the "prime time" for new quizzes. A few hours later, the quiz is likely still on the recents page, but it will be around midnight UTC and most Europeans will probably be sleeping! This will make the quiz fail to maximize the first (and maybe only) few hours it is easily accessible by the public.

For this reason, the optimal time for releasing new quizzes is perhaps 13:00-15:00 UTC. During this time, the number of people on the site will be going up, and the next few hours will be the "prime time" for new quizzes to make the most of their limited timeframe of easily picking up takes from the general public.

As mentioned earlier, people may be less reliant on JetPunk for entertainment over the weekend, given the sheer amount of free time available that can be allotted to other things. On top of that, there may be less fluctuation in the number of users online throughout the day, given that they have all day free. The rule of thumb for maximizing takes on weekends, therefore, is that you should avoid sleeping hours (and only sleeping hours). However, in general it's not recommended to post new quizzes on weekends since fewer people are on JetPunk, as I previously mentioned.

Before ending the blog, I also want to draw from my own experiences of making quizzes. Since the early days, I have always suspected that the time of day actually matters for new quizzes made by smaller users.

I had been located in the GMT+8 time zone for a long time since I joined the site in December 2020. When I became aware that a large portion of users lived in the States, I started trying to align the release times of new quizzes with American daylight hours (which was evening for me). To be specific, I tended to release my quizzes somewhere between 8 and 10 PM local time, with occasional 7 PM releases. Most of the time I would see at least a few, usually around 10, takes on the newly released quiz after I woke up in the morning. If you refer to the previous section of the blog and do some simple math, you'll notice that I actually managed my release times quite well.

If I recall correctly, I also released quizzes in the afternoon a handful of times, mainly because I had finished making those quizzes in the morning and didn't want to wait a whole day to release them. And as you may have already guessed, most of those quizzes didn't do as well compared to those released in the evening (at least that's what I remember).

In September 2023 I started studying in the UK, which means that I am now primarily located in the GMT time zone. I have released a few quizzes in the evening hours (usually after 9 or 10 PM) while in the UK, most of which were met with relatively fewer takes. I think this is partly because some of those quizzes are on niche topics, but the poor time choice may have also played a role there - looking at the table in the previous section, it's easy to see that those hours in GMT/UTC are less than optimal.

So, in summary, my own experiences have (in my opinion) reinforced the idea that the time of day matters for new user quizzes.

I hope that you enjoyed this blog, and that you can now try to align your quiz release times with the "prime time" for maximum takes. However, it's essential to keep in mind that this blog is partly based on my personal opinion, and the actual "prime time" for new quizzes may or may not agree with my estimates. But in any case, one thing's for sure: try not to post quizzes while the majority of users are sleeping!

Also, remember that the time of day isn't the only thing that determines how many takes your quizzes will get. If you keep making low-quality quizzes, then of course they're probably not going to get a lot of takes, regardless of when they are released.

Thanks for reading, and happy quizzing.