I'm not sure... From my past experiences if you post an item that hangs on the front page for around 15 hours you will get around 3000 visits. That order of ma

I'm not sure... From my past experiences if you post an item that hangs on the front page for around 15 hours you will get around 3000 visits. That order of magnitude is my experience. Google for "the hackernews effect". I know Justin Vincent from the techzing podcast (great podcast) has posted numbers from when his web app Pluggio (formerly tweetminer) was on Hacker News, so you could search for that.