An example: being mentioned on Reddit | Hacker News Reader

An example: being mentioned on Reddit

blog.socialsci.com

89 pointsLogicX18 comments

We had a user post a Wormwall (a quick one page webpage service we offer) on Reddit that made the front page. We hit 130 thousand page requests in 2 hours. A pretty intense day.

It was also our largest moneymaking day ever (ads), eclipsing an entire week in the top 10 hot stories on Lifehacker.

While reddit was intense, it was over by basically the end of the day. Lifehacker on the other hand hit pretty hard, but the burn was much slower. We were still seeing effects from it weeks later (mostly from second hand sites that carried the story).

I wrote up a blog post about the LH event, but haven't had a chance to write one up about reddit yet. http://kymalabs.blogspot.com/2011/04/what-its-like-to-make-f...

Reddit is like an enormous spotlight. They have so much traffic, but it's focused on just 25 spots on the front page each day. As a result, whatever gets on the front page receives a truly astonishing burst of traffic. And this effect only increases as Reddit grows — for even as their size has doubled and quadrupled over the years, all that traffic is still focused on the same 25 spots.

It's true that you can make your own subreddits, and of course you can keep loading more pages, but the cutoff rate is pretty severe. A few non-default subreddits (like /r/Frugal) do have sizable power since they're well targeted, essentially functioning like mini-reddits.

HN is similar, but since they go out of they way to stay obscure, any increase in traffic is practically accidental.

     but it's focused on just 25 spots on the front page each day

You can get 35k views in a day from getting to place 93.

and you can get 8k views in a day from the 175-largest subreddit

Part of the problem is getting people to come to new reddits, even if they might be generally interesting. One of the reason some of the bigger ones are so big is that they come as default subscriptions with every new account. But yeah, it's a very intense spotlight at this point.

I'm wondering if they've ever thought of just building up pseudo-random front pages for different visitors. So everybody doesn't just see the same 25 links (which to be honest are mostly imgur at this point). Reddit almost suffers from a critical mass problem. New submissions, if timed poorly will go nowhere, while others will fly to the moon simply because other people have upvoted them.

I like the psuedo-random subreddit idea--maybe a stochastic process that gives you a new set of subscribed subreddits, taking into account submissions you've upvoted. Have a button somewhere that'll do it, and another one to revert to your previous subreddits.

That would help people get past the "I've been here three months and reddit is boring now" phase, and on to customizing their experience with the worthier subreddits.

reddit is becoming abysmally boring in certain ways.

For example, a great majority of posts these days are simply links to imgur, of pictures that already exist elsewhere. Linking to the source would have provided greater access to a wider scope of content. You could probably get much of the "reddit experience" just going to imgur and browsing recent uploads.

A few months ago I posted a writeup about displaying a Gameboy video signal on an oscilloscope (http://www.flashingleds.wordpress.com). It did the rounds for a few days (kotaku, HN, hackaday, slashdot etc.), and I was slightly surprised at which sites generated the biggest numbers. Reddit was at the top by far, something like 25k in 24 hours without having even made their front page, followed by slashdot (7k) then HN (3k). For a site that usually ambles along at ~80 hits a day it was pretty crazy.

I was one of those views. That was a cool project!

Now compare your numbers to what I got by running a sponsored post just few days ago -

  8K+ impressions
  120+ clicks         ( 1.50% )
  40+ comments        ( 15 are mine )
  20+ subscriptions   ( for project updates )
  post score of 8-11  ( changes with every reload )

Run time - 3 days, cost - $130.

I suspect that we all here read Gabriel's mega-praise for reddit's self-serve ads [1], but YMMV and it appears that natural mentions are far more effective than promoted stuff... which is not that surprising really.

[1] http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/03/my-duck-duck-go-...

One thing to point out in this specific case is that the demographic to which SocialSci directly benefits (i.e., survey participants) resonates with a (rather large) subset of Reddit users, contributing to their surge in sign-ups.

I'd even go as far as saying this kind of "organic" discovery by a more diverse community trumps the spike in traffic generated by being frontpaged on HN, whose user base is admittedly a little more technically minded and bourgeois in nature, and consequently reflects poorly on long term growth potential.

We experienced something very similar when drumming up interest in my startup, Fitocracy, on the r/fitness section of Reddit. The key here, which should be quite obvious, is to find your target audience and then get your message to them.

Exactly the point I was driving across. I've actually signed up and followed media coverage of your site for while- you guys are building an incredible product (I'm a real advocate of the whole gamification concept).

Very interesting to see the detailed stats on the impact this had.

I'm hopeful we get to see the follow-up post soon: "Being frontpaged on Hacker News"

A few articles along those lines:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2733866

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2452178

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2228000

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1298501

Another (mine) http://www.kevinohashi.com/20/04/2011/24000-domains-article-...

Might be worth even buying an ad on reddit (the ones up the top) and targeting it at that subreddit. Being open and immersive with your customers (especially the denizens of reddit) pays off from what I've seen.

404?

They fixed it, apparently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com