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Comment by dshacker | Hacker News Reader

I actually made it once or twice to HNs front page, and what I've seen is that HN is one of the heaviest users of adblockers in the general population. I did a request counter vs an analytics counter, and I'd say you easily get 2x or 3x the traffic google analytics shows.

View on HN

Which honestly makes a ton of sense. while the HN crowd might be the biggest beneficiary of ad tech, they also are the most knowledgeable about blocking it and of course know how intrusive and annoying it is.

We call those types of people hypocrites where I come from.

It’s just “You don’t get high on your supply”.

When the comparison to a heroin dealer is considered more charitable...

I don't disagree.

Oh.. that's interesting. I noticed that FF is blocking GA by default now - or at least my configuration.

I think I'm going to inject a tracking pixel to see if you're hypothesis is correct. Just to measure the number of requests.

It would actually be really interesting to see.

Polar has about 15% FF usage right now that hit the site directly.

My site has been front-paged on HN several times as well, and I can corroborate. On those occasions my log files show something like a tenfold uptick in average traffic, while GA registers a tripling or so. When I get front-paged on reddit, by contrast, GA shows about 70-80% as many visitors as indicated in the access log.

Also, my site is supported by donations, and when one of our articles gains traction on HN we get a substantial increase in one-time donors during that day. Other big sites like reddit barely bump the numbers at all, despite often bringing a much greater increase in total visitors.

One time we were front-paged on /r/TodayILearned, and GA showed a peak of 6,680 concurrent visitors. Hotchie motchie.

How do you implement the request counter? I tried to find a better way to get metrics on my blog than Google Analytics but couldn't find a good, easy solution.

And how do you know those views weren't bots/crawlers? Pulling apart "real" traffic from fake seems impossible. :(

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