Page view count is not enough. Page view velocity is important, as well as number of comments. The page view count can be modeled (from a statistical point of view) as an exponential distribution (growing fast in the first 24 hours, but decreasing over time). In short, it is a right-censored process (since we don't see the future) but a precise count over a 6-month time period can be estimated even for a post that is just 7-day old. If you make the right adjustments, then you can compare a 7-day old post with a 2-year old one, in terms of popularity as measured by page view count.

So how would you do to measure the popularity of an article?

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