Google Analytics data of being slashdotted and posted here. | Hacker News Reader

Google Analytics data of being slashdotted and posted here.

smellslikedonkey.com

18 pointsmrcharles20 comments

Thanks for sharing!

Here's what my analytics looked like when someone submitted my http://www.patiencepractice.com site to Digg: http://imgur.com/p3gpd

I don't have my server set up to alert me when it starts getting higher traffic. Does anyone have any good tips on how to do that? I'm running this on Linode.

Since we're sharing, here's my experience with the Reddit front page:

http://blamcast.net/articles/speed-up-drupal

Side note: check out the referrer list image. See HN in there? That's how I discovered this place :)

Here's my analytics during my most popular submission reaching 30k views in 1 day.

http://www.codexon.com/temp/traffic.png

What may also interest you is that I earned around 50 cents in advertisements during this increase of traffic. I can't legally tell you the other statistics because of the AdSense TOS.

I had hoped that I could at least sustain the cost of the hosting through ads, but I don't know how I am making pennies on mountains of traffic while everyone else claims they are making $5+ a day.

Your ads might not be well targeted enough/have low CPC rates.

Plus, your site seems to be aimed at techies. Most of us don't ever click ads so it's tough to monetize that way.

Nice blog though :-)

Do you mean that the only way to earn a reasonable amount (at least enough for hosting) is to target a dumber audience?

I didn't say you're targeting more intelligent people, just more technologically inclined people who are most likely accustomed to Adsense ads and therefore less likely to click on them and provide you income.

There are a lot of niches out there that are full of really intelligent people who are less technologically inclined than most of us who would be more likely to give consideration to an Adsense ad than we would..

My Beginning Ruby royalties post that did pretty well here got about 3000 visitors from HN in the first 24 hours, and 4000 from Slashdot in.. several hours, before I took it down due to their erroneous summary (and having had a kid the same day) :-)

Purely in terms of traffic, slashdot or reddit doesn't give you anywhere as much traffic as Digg or Stumbleupon can send your way.

They all have a high bounce rate, I think it is normal for traffic from social media sites.

Digg will give you a big spike right away but it fall off the front page so fast that it doesn't last long. Slashdot seems to give you a boost for a whole day.

Each link on digg stay on the homepage for approx. 2-5 hours (depending on the time of the day), there are roughly 50-60 links on the frontpage a day. It makes sense that slashdot is likely to send you traffic throughout the day at more or less same pace. In case of digg, even after it gets removed from the front page a story can move to the "top 10 list" for the nest 10+ hours which sends huge amount of traffic.

Speaking from personal experience, I have seen digg send traffic from 5k to 60k in a day. Here is a recent example: http://imgur.com/NWAWG.png google analytic roughly shows the same traffic numbers.

Digg pages rank pretty OK in Google. I got very roughly 10k hits for a site from the Digg effect, then 1.5k over the next 2 years from people who randomly found the Digg post and clicked through.

Biggest effect of all was that many blogs found my site through Digg, then linked back to it, leading to an improved ranking that brought 31k hits from Google (over 2 years).

Still all of this is peanuts and didn't amount to anything, time spent on that site was mostly good as a learning experience. It brought in less than $500 in revenue (total) over the years, despite being in a very lucrative niche (domain names) and being on Digg, Reddit and del.icio.us main pages.

Currently the site is broken and I am not maintaining it anymore, but it was a list of domain names that are expiring soon. It didn't make much revenue because right after a hit of popularity my affiliate partner cancelled their affiliate program for registering expiring domain names, and I could never find another one and could only slap AdSense there.

A high bounce rate isn't necessarily bad, as it is accepted for social media sites. However a bounce rate of 90% with 5,000+ hits, still means 500 users don't bounce and stand a chance of becoming potential long-term readers/users/whatever and for a new or small site, that can give you a good jump on word-of-mouth growth.

I don't think a slashdotting is what it used to be, both in the number of users, and in the amount of bandwidth available to the site getting slashdotted.

Agreed. I am not a programmer by any stretch of even my own imagination, but I do have a website that kindof sortof seems to work. I've had things make it to the front page of here, and slashdot and was extremely surprised that it didn't just crash my machine (it's slicehost's cheapest VPS).

This was weird to me because I grew up around fark and slashdot hearing stories about servers going down almost immediately after being posted. I think that those days might actually be gone.

It's always been a case of severely underpowered hosts. I've gotten slashdotted several times, and frankly it's not that much traffic (anymore, anyway)

The biggest problem seemed to be sites running on hosts with far too little memory, far too low maximum number of Apache (or whatever) processes, or mismatched maximum number of Apache processes and database connections.

Though I'm sure there's at least an order of magnitude difference depending on the post.

It's more often a problem of running our of server side resources than bandwidth (if your blog software isn't configured to survive a lot of users, you're going to run out of RAM and CPU long before you run out of bandwidth).

http://www.fudgie.org/slashdotted.html - a recording of the traffic glTail got from Slashdot after it was announced. If I remember correctly, it got a bit over 4000 requests/minute at the 'worst'.

Just for the record, this isn't my site, but a friends'. Posting it here cause it seems in line with common topics.

Your bounce rate is surely very high (90%) - do others also have this large bounce rate? Ours is close to 50%

you get 50% bounce from spikes from reddit, slashdot? or you get 50% bounce rate normally?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com