Traffic spikes - The Hacker News Effect | Hacker News Reader

Traffic spikes - The Hacker News Effect

alexblom.com

10 pointsAlexBlom14 comments

It would be interesting to see the absolute numbers i.e. how many unique visitors have come to your blog entry from HN's front page.

Generally one of my articles that end up at the top of HN gets about 5000 hits, most in the first 2-3 hours.

A lesser article gets, well, less hits... 1, 2, 3k, depending.

Here's a screenshot:

http://skitch.com/swombat/n9mrs/danieltenner.com-dashboard-c...

You can probably correlate those with article dates on my blog and find out how many votes translate to what level of traffic.

Edit: I wouldn't give so much weight to the HN RSS feed. Google Reader is by far the largest subscriber to my feed, and hits from there register as hits from google.com, not hits from news.ycombinator.com.

As you can easily see here: http://skitch.com/swombat/n9mfb/danieltenner.com-dashboard-c... the Google reader hits are a very small minority. Most people read HN on HN, not on the RSS feed. I guess the author uses the RSS feed and so gives it a disproportionate weight.

Hi. I'll try to clean my language from the site up a little. I do use the RSS feed for the stories however most hits came direct from the website.

And corrected. I mis-titled the picture.

From the few times my site (devgrow.com) has been on the front page of HN, I've gotten about 1000 visitors or so over the span of 24 hours. This has been consistent for both a post with 10 upvotes and another with 18. I would assume it would get maybe double or triple that if it had more votes and stayed on the front page longer?

/r/programming on the other hand sent over 3800 visitors during a 3-day period.

Hope that helps!

For me, it has been about 1.2k from HN, and ten times that much from reddit.

Thanks. I did not put in absolute numbers because the story was live only 12 hours ago.

To give you some perspective though the top bar in the graph was around 1,600 hits :) While I was on the 'new' page (but not yet on the RSS feed) the article had around 350 hits from HN.

Usually I get around 3k, but one of my lasts posts was featured on lifehacker and I ended up with like 50k uniques or more. There are very cool people reading this website.

I got around 1500 requests with HTTP referrer HN when a post of mine was submitted earlier this month. Vast majority were from the front page.

I got about 2000 hits from HN when I did a post about Google making their big font size change back in 2009.

I've had a few things from my sites hit the top of HN. In fact, that's how I found HN (so, big thanks to those who've submitted my stuff on helping me find this awesome community)

Still, I get an order of magnitude more traffic from a good day on StumbleUpon than from hitting the top of the page here at HN.

FYI, it's "moral" not "morale."

Thanks. Did not pick it up in my proof - typo corrected.

If you're using WordPress, consider using After the Deadline. It doesn't detect moral vs. morale today, but I'll make sure it does next time I deploy an update. It'll find a lot of other typos for you though.

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