4 ms·
Ask HN: What is the international distribution/statistics of HN visitors?
Dear all,
do we have an statistics on visitor location/country here?
Would be curious: Is it US-centered? How much people from LatAm or SEA? EU?
Maybe there was a question like this in the past, but I couldnt find it.
(Maybe this is a question for @dang?)
- fancy_pantser 10mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35567986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35567986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44572750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44572750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30210378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30210378
- squigz 10mo agoThese comments from dang in 2018 are worth linking as well https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16444556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16444556
- mosura 10mo agoIt is noticeable how since covid SV takes this place dramatically less seriously, largely because it used to be the case that getting to the top here got you a lot of attention in SV, but that hasn’t been the case in years.
- squigz 10mo agoI've never worked anywhere even close to SV, so I don't know how true any of this is. But the idea that things happen in SV because someone basically got fancy reddit upvotes is sort of concerning.
- chistev 10mo agoWow, my initial guess would have been it's overwhelmingly full of Americans.
- ksec 10mo ago>Would be curious: Is it US-centered? How much people from LatAm or SEA? EU? Why would it not be US centered? YC is an US company. Overall, US + Canada is 50 - 60%. UK + EU is 25 - 35%. You could find post that lands on HN frontage showing their stats.
- lordnacho 10mo agoProbably more to do with HN being a tech community, and the US is the largest highly developed country where a lot of kids can learn tech stuff. So you get a disproportionate number of programmers and related professionals who are American. If Silicon Valley were in the UK I think most HN contributers would still be American.
- dmos62 10mo agoIs Facebook US-centered? I don't think that means much.
- ch2026 10mo ago[flagged]
- mbreese 10mo agoIf you follow HN over the course of 24 hours, you’ll see at least 3 major waves. I tend to have an odd sleep schedule, so I’m always amused when I’m online to see which group is currently active. There is an Asian/Australian wave, followed by Europe, and the North America. Some of the best times are when the waves start to mix (ex: early morning NYC time, you’ll get the Europe and NA groups interacting). You’ll see different types of stories posted. Similar enough to where it all makes sense to be on HN, but it seems like a different flavor. But the comments are where I start to see more differences. You can get new takes on the same article if you see the comments from different times of the day. This doesn’t take into account the total numbers of people active from each region, which I suspect is skewed towards more users the US coasts. But, it does, I think, speak to how US centric HN is. I think it serves the needs each of the waves in a distinct way. In many ways, this is just an extension of the weekend HN effect. You can clearly observe differences on the site over the weekends. So, to me, it is unsurprising that you’d find differences across time zones. I’d love to actually see this analyzed more. This is just the take from someone who has been awake at enough hours to observe some anecdotal trends.
- chistev 10mo agoI imagine it's majority Americans. I'd guess over 70% Americans.
- doodlesdev 10mo agoI've seen a few Brazilians (like me) lurking around sometimes, so certainly there are people from LatAm. I'd wager the distribution of countries that read Hacker News and the distribution for people who comment might be slightly different. The distributions linked in another comment seem somewhat unreal to me, but perhaps I'm just imagining every English-speaking person on the internet as an American LOL. Also, the other comment regarding the time zones is absolutely real. It's a fun experiment to check out Hacker News at unusual times of the day and observe the differences in content and especially in the comments section.
- jampa 10mo agoAfter years of lurking, I made some posts this year here. Here is what my Google Analytics and Substack traffic from HN shows: 51% US 5% United Kingdom 4% Germany 3% Australia, Canada, India The rest are primarily European countries, with Sweden, Denmark, France, and Spain leading the way. * Most people here use ad blockers. I imagine this data is incomplete and would reflect the mobile portion of the users. I don't log IP addresses.
- embedding-shape 10mo agoI think biggest issue is that you'll get a certain sub-segment of the HN audience, even if many use ad blockers. For example, all your latest submissions seems to be about AI/LLM, career growth and product engineering, probably someone submitting stories in other themes will get different data.
- hackerbrother 10mo agoI am from the North Pole. My name is Santa Claus.
- andrewinardeer 10mo agoShouldn't you be sleeping? You've had a busy 24 hours.
- skylurk 10mo agoPretty sure santa works east-west, starting at the international date line. He stretches Christmas day into 48 hours. This is how he can do so many deliveries in a single date.
- mmmuhd 10mo agoNobody here talks of Africa, we are here too
- karianyu 10mo agoAfrica is here
- karianyu 10mo agoWhere is Africa? Kenya? Arrgh.
- dongecko 10mo agoA while back, someone made https://meet.hn https://meet.hn. It's a map where people from hackernews could locate themselves. Of course this is by far not comprehensive, but it gives you an idea of where the people are from.
- ostwilkens 10mo agoTwo of my blog posts were on the front page earlier this year, netting 56k unique visitors. The visits were spread over multiple days, and should cover different timezones somewhat well. The analytics are located at an endpoint which looks vital, and should bypass most adblockers. 35.1% United States 8.0% Germany 6.5% United Kingdom 5.4% Canada 3.1% Australia 3.0% France 2.7% Netherlands 2.6% India 2.4% Sweden 1.9% Poland 1.7% Switzerland 1.6% Spain 1.4% Japan 1.4% Belgium 1.3% Italy 1.1% Austria 1.1% Finland 1.0% Norway 1.0% Brazil 7.0% Other countries
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- p1esk 10mo agoNo China or Russia? Strange…
- wojciii 10mo agoMaybe because of VPN usage? No reason to get arrested because of viewing a picture of some massacre on a square in a large city or sent to the SMO because one reads some Ukraine news not approved by their government.
- throwaway808081 10mo agoHN is blocked in mainland China, so stats of visitors from China are likely to be low. HN is similarly blocked in Russia. Users from these locations would come via VPN. Unfettered linking of the latest Rust AIs, sharing of random peoples' purchases of Framework laptops, heat over GPLv2 vs. AGPL vs. BSD, and discussion of whether nixOS's use of *nix was or was not prior to Unix's use or Shakespeare's use, is clearly too much for some censors.
- KomoD 10mo ago> HN is similarly blocked in Russia. Doesn't seem to be true, the domain doesn't seem to be in Roskomnadzor's blacklist and I can reach it through Globalping nodes (incl. residential nodes)
- baxtr 10mo agoYou should repeat this poll https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30210378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30210378