Traffic sources: Forget what you think about tech PR

Compared to the news sites you've mentioned, I've increasingly discovered that the primary reason I read things on HN is the page load times. The professional commentary, snark, and community of TechCrunch are lovely - but they simply aren't worth a load time fifteen times longer than a text page full of HN comments and a quick link to the article/startup in question. Makes me wonder what other things I would more readily consume with a primarily text driven interface...

I legitimately read this as "A note to all startups on here: HN killed TC in traffic driving to our startup." I came in to post condolences.

Why is the link back to Hacker News a Facebook doorway page? For tracking purposes?

Comments on HN are a huge value-add. I can't stand other tech sites now, where the quality of the conversation is pages of fanboys calling each other names.

If HN was so awesome for driving traffic, why is the link to the original post passing through Facebook?

A post by TC has still much more "social proof" and SEO juice (stupid word). We still get converting visitors based on a two year old TC post...

Tech PR is definitely overrated. Just take a look at the startups covered in January of 20102 and see where they are now. It's sexy having your site be covered by NY Times, Techcrunch, Gigaom, and all these publications, but it's no guarantee of success... I mean, whatever happened to Hipster????

Rather than focus on publicity, people should hang out in the communities where their target audience is. If you're building a travel site, that means Lonely Planet forums. PR is just smoke and mirrors. What really matters is reaching the people who will really use your site.

I think this means HN readers are way more 'engaged' than TC's. HN readers are more interested in the topics being treated here, and click-through rate is probably higher. It's also important the fact that in HN you only have a link to the site, not an article explaining what the site is.

Oh, and I also agree with gojomo: would be very interesting to have followup data, most signups, most active signups...

This assumes that the kind of traffic you want to your startup is from industry peers - ie people who read industry websites.

I'd offer you'd be much better off using your resources to gain customer-traffic rather than industry-traffic. Spend the same PR resource getting into the publications and websites run by the people who will actually give you money or engagement.

Interesting followup data would be:

Moreso than traffic, which resulted in the most signups (absolute or as a percentage of visits)?

Which cohort of signups had the most still-active users weeks/months later?

The service would seem to be of more interest to dedicated travelers than the kind of tech/startup junkies who visit HN/TC/TNW. Have you had any traffic/signup surges from coverage in travel-focused forums to compare?

Let's be careful not to trade one publicity superficiality for another: it's not only number of page views that counts, but the prestige of the referrer.

For example, I once received 150,000 views through a Reddit/pics submission on my Flickr account. If the New York Times featured my photo on the front of its Travel subsite, I would bet my Flickr photo page would get a negligible number of hits...it's as another HN commenter noted, HN provides more click-throughs because HN only provides links, not articles.

I would also wager that the NYT Travel section gets fewer than 150,000 views a day...but in terms of bragging rights, if I were to try to shop my portfolio around as a professional photog, front page of the NYT Travel would mean a lot more than front page of Reddit/pics.

If you were a VC investor, would you be more willing to evaluate a startup that made it to the front of HN or was validated by a TN post?