Ask HN: How much traffic from a techcrunch story?
Does anyone know the amount of traffic a techcrunch story will generate for a site. Basically, what do I need to handle to not crash :)
I'm trying to figure out the time span for this. Is it tends of thousands in a day? In an hour? What's the peak?
It was submitted at 12:54 pm on a Wednesday, received 54 hits in first hour. First comment on HN appeared at 1:20 pm, after 27 hits. It got 68 page views during the first 24 hours, and 0 after that. As you can see, almost all the hits came during the first hour after submission, and drastically tapered off after that. Also, none of the visitors subscribed to the RSS feed.
I theorize that there would have been more hits if:
1. There were more comments. I think there were 3, and two were mine. Often, a conversation in the comments can drive traffic
2. There was more content. It was a blog, and I only had two or three posts. I was looking for feedback on my idea, which was all in the first post, but more content might have gotten people talking.
3. There was accomplishment. Kind of a tricky one, when you’re looking for feedback on an idea. A chicken or the egg problem. If I had put my idea into practice and accomplished something and then posted, people would be talking. But it can be helpful to get comments on an idea before you put it into practice, so it was helpful that way to.
Basically, I'm not in a hurry to get things done, so this was a great experiment for when I will be looking for press, hype or feedback. I'm taking my time with my project, so I was very happy with my numbers overall. I will actually be blogging about these numbers one of these days, because thats basically what my idea is all about. Experimenting.