Profit from frontpaging HN and Reddit - what now? | Hacker News Reader

Profit from frontpaging HN and Reddit - what now?

yieldthought.com

The author of this post submitted it 45 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1869264

Interesting how the luck of getting noticed on the new page is so important to getting engagement. I wonder if in this case it's the difference in titles.

I was pretty surprised to find this on the frontpage. I've noticed that the new page is a brutal place; anyone who had a twitter following (or a few friends) prepared to throw in a few votes right after submission would probably be guaranteed to front page and pick up enough visits to give the page a fair score.

In this case, I think submitter is more important than title - RiderOfGiraffes is very well-known and probably has his own version of the pg effect.

Yeah, that doesn't really work in the long run. I organize the Toronto HN Nights, and even though a whole bunch of us upvoted TOHNN 2, it languished. I assume that we were caught in a vote ring (because naturally people from Toronto consistently upvote anything to do with Toronto). In my opinion the title is much more important than having a few friends.

DupDetector dropped the ball on this one. ;)

This is one of the final experiments. DupDetector found some information, and using that I've deliberately resubmitted something that was submitted several weeks ago, that I think deserves attention, that gained no attention last time, and at a time that I thought might be more suitable.

DupDetector did find the repetition, but I'm no longer acting on its findings. People seem to resent it too much.

ironic, since this was actually submitted by RiderOfGiraffes - the user behind DupDetector!

Hence the ;)

ah - I wasn't sure.

;)

No referrer has typically corresponded to Twitter clients in my experience. Given the volume of discussion of the post on Twitter, this seems like the most likely explanation.

There is the occasional Twitter client that does set a referrer value, like Twitterific, but most seem to skip this.

Do they set the user agent?

Does anyone know what the stats app used is? Thanks.

I was wondering the same thing. Turns out that he's using Analytk, a project that he created himself.

Here's what it appears to do:

1. A referrer information is gathered on each page hit via javascript and submitted to his server

2. The Analytics page uses Ajax to grab the aggregated data, then charts it using the Google Charts API

That's it. At first I was really interested in it because its beautiful, but on a second look it doesn't do anything that Google Analytics doesn't already do except easily show you referrals from a set of sites that you care about.

I wrote it because it gives me real time tracking for posts that have just been published. Initially it updates every minute, which is really fascinating to see. The rate of hits once the site is picked up by HN or Reddit is a very strong predictor of it's final page view count.

The graphs get a bit pointless after a day or two, though. If people are interested in playing around with analytk then maybe I'll open it up to URLs from elsewhere and work down some of my 'to do' features, like 'show me just the day/week'.

Thanks for the beauty vote, I wrote it to look great on my iPhone :-)

No matter what, you are my ideal weekend project success story, for making something useful, relatively easy to write and very fun.

I would advice to look at seo and landing page strategies. also try optimizely for a/b testing.

Thanks, I'm struggling to justify adding a/b testing vs all the other things I could do with the same amount of time (e.g. add social proof etc.)

Also it took me a long time to realize I can a/b test amazon conversions by using multiple affiliate ids... ;)

The traffic itself is temporary, but the random backlinks the site got from the brief awareness should be good for seo. When I submitted my now-defunct expired domain name related site and got a similar treatment, it pushed me nearly to the top for the term "expired domain names" on Google.

>Strangely, most of the traffic to the game site is ‘direct’, which can mean almost anything in analytics. Privacy-aware browsers, links sent thorough offline email programs, who knows? Not Google, that’s for sure:

Direct means 4chan, just fyi

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