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HN accounts for 12% of Social Bookmark referral traffic
Note: I work on Woopra projects :-)
- calaniz 16y agoThis wasn't at all surprising to me. HN has a great community of tech enthusiasts who have a insatiable appetite for tech content. I'm sure the people who ask for critiques on their web apps get a nice traffic boost.
- JacobAldridge 16y agoI had a phone call this morning with our national GM, where I had to explain why HN is noted as consistently in our top 5 referring sites (which is to say I had to explain what HN actually is). That's attributable to the fact that I'm active in this community, so I was surprised to see it accounting for so much traffic on a larger sample, but there's certainly evidence that even links that get no votes and no comments still drive traffic (though not as much as links that add value and create discussion).
- statictype 16y agoI suspect that getting a lot of visits from 'Hacker News' doesn't sound very comfortable to many people.
- dotcoma 16y agoto many (dumb) people.
- JacobAldridge 16y agoYes, I note the OP refers to YCombinator rather than Hacker News, but as the profile of both grow outside of the tech community not making the distinction will become more and more inaccurate.
- vaksel 16y agothe fact that they have HN as having 2.4 times more referrer traffic than reddit makes me question this. Look at the numbers, HN is a top 3,000 site, reddit is a top 300 site.
- timdorr 16y agoThere is less motion on HN vs. Reddit. You'll usually get up to 3 full pages of new stories a day on Reddit (depending on the number of subreddits you subscribe to) and there is also a fracturing of the community around subreddits. HN is one single stream of content that has many stories on the first page for the entire day. Essentially, HN is a subreddit to itself.
- acgourley 16y agoThat shouldn't matter, they are just measuring pure volume on the other side. HN users may read more stories than Reddit users, but I wouldn't assume that.
- acgourley 16y agoMaybe a bias in who installs their measurement tools. One huge programming or startup site (techcrunch?) might be skewing the numbers towards hacker news, which could believably drive more tech-news readers than reddit.
- pvg 16y agohttp://www.raterush.com/pages/digg-reddit http://www.raterush.com/pages/digg-reddit might explain this somewhat. A huge chunk of reddit links are back to reddit, to imgur and to things like major newspapers and youtube. If only a few of these are not actually tracked by Woopra, the results would get skewed significantly.
- ArcticCelt 16y agoThen for the few legitimate remaining articles, I'll postulate that reddit users go to comment after only reading the headline and never follow the link of the article. Maybe HN readers are more diligent and do read/visit the articles more often.
- apu 16y agoArgh misleading stupid 3d graphs!
- zhyder 16y agoUseful data, thanks! I'm a little disappointed the pie charts don't include 'Other', which would have given a sense of how long the tail is. Regarding the seeming discrepancy in data for Google's share, the reasons are probably: (i) more of Bing/Yahoo's traffic stays within their portals than Google's does, and (ii) Google is especially dominant among tech-savvy users, and the websites that were analyzed have proportionally more of such users (which would also explain why HN shows up).
- ars 16y agoWow, slashdot has really fallen far. I know that I personally hardly read it anymore, but I used to read it many times per day.
- jacquesm 16y agoSlashdot always had a tendency to discuss stuff without reading the article first, or at all. So it doesn't drive as much traffic as you might expect, but when your site does get mentioned on /. it gets much more traffic than a HN posting. Also, there probably is very little overlap between the typical /. covered site and the sites that woopra covers, /. is not really a start-up related site. If you were to re-run the numbers with all of google analytics covered sites (impossible to get the data, unfortunately) you'd likely get a different picture. The barrier to entry for a successful HN posting is much lower than it is on /., the volume of 'posted' stories on /. is much lower too. All in all less surprising than you'd think at first sight.
- BrandonM 16y agoConsidering that Social Networking site data is skewed due to not accounting for apps, could it be possible that is happening in the Social Bookmark space as well? Do Reddit and Slashdot have iPhone/Android apps?
- username3 16y agoPeople still use StumbleUpon?
- joshu 16y agoHn is not a social bookmarking website.
- jacquesm 16y agoHN is many things to many people, and to some it is definitely a social bookmarking site. It even has something called a 'bookmarklet', if you have a description of HN that does not include the social bookmarking aspect (posting links and discussing them) then I'm very interested in to what you think HN is.
- joshu 16y agoIt's a forum. Most of the threads are started with a link to discuss but not all. I mean, how is it useful as bookmarks, social or otherwise? Are you able to save something so you can return to it later? There are lots of bookmark lets that have nothing to do with bookmarking. It's just a way to execute some JavaScript in the context of a page. Most of the sites there aren't social bookmarking, either. SU has the functionality, though. For what it's worth, I'm the one who coined the term.
- jacquesm 16y agoCheck the 'saved' link on your profile page. So, yes, you can return to those pages at a later point in time.
- joshu 16y agoI'm not even sure how to get stuff on or off that list. Again, in what way can you use this site as your bookmarks? You save an obscure documentation page and a mod deletes it, and then what? HN (like digg, reddit, etc) is social news, or something. People who confuse the two think so because the delicious front page and digg looked similar, or whatever.
- jacquesm 16y ago
- dotcoma 16y agoAnybody else thinking we should be alarmed at this kind of data - because of the spammers and self-promoters who will flock to HN, I mean...
- joshu 16y agoThis data is sounds biased. Delicious did in the BILLIONS of monthly PVs when I left - I really doubt HN throws more traffic in aggregate.
- jey 16y agoYeah, this just shows that they have an install base hugely skewed towards sites that techies read.
- pg 16y agoTheir numbers do sound high. HN gets about 60k unique visitors on weekdays. We used to have about 750k pageviews on weekdays, but I just cracked down on crawlers that were killing performance, and the number is closer to 650k now. I've heard from several people that HN is a source of referral traffic out of proportion to its size, presumably because its concentration means more articles are interesting to more readers. But it would have to be a traffic source way out of proportion to its size to get the kind of numbers they're quoting in this study.
- jasonlbaptiste 16y agoI've had 2 or 3 occasions that I've had a post which was the most popular on both HN and delicious at the same time. The stats here sound reasonably correct. I'd need to dig in deeper though, but I can certainly say HN drives more traffic. The real question I guess is: Is this comparing apples to oranges (popular on hn vs popular on delicious).
- ck2 16y agoThe reason why slashdot.org shows no traffic driven is because most visitors there know to block their referer.