When sorting by “Trending” users can see the number of reads on a given article and the article lists are sorted by most reads to fewest reads.
When a user loads an article page, a small library called read-js runs some code to determine when it believes a user has roughly “read” that article. It does this via some math around the number of words in the article, average reading speeds, how much time the user has spent on the page, and how far down the page they’ve scrolled. At a certain point, it will detect the article has likely been read and will fire a signal off to CBC. Finally, we can count the number of these read events for each article in order to present a list of those sorted by the most reads.
The current version of the model uses 5 minute intervals when sorting articles, meaning the number presented will be the number of those read events seen for the given article roughly within the last 5 minutes.