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Ask HN: What is the highest trafficked website run by an individual?
I run Twicsy (twitter picture search) in my spare time by myself and receive over 5.5 million monthly unique visitors (current trailing month according to Google Analytics).
I am curious about what other large sites there are out there run by a single person? Is 4chan the biggest site run by one person?
- ceslami 14y agoMarkus Frind, Plenty of Fish: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rolling-in.html http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rol...
- jemka 14y agoThat came to my mind too, but it's no longer just Markus and hasn't been for some time. They currently have 66 employees. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlentyofFish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlentyofFish
- indiecore 14y agoMy gut reaction was 4chan as well and I feel like that's probably true; well, for the English speaking world anyway.
- Weltschmerz 14y agoWhile Poole may be the only one (or one of the few) people getting checks from 4chan.org, he doesn't have full responsibility for the operation of the site. The site is managed by many volunteer members; "janitors." I think there is something to be said here about the power of an authentic internet community whose participants are willing to work for no compensation, to further its dictator's interests. And that discussion probably involves entertainment value, as well as an apparent sense of equality.
- JohnTheRipper 14y agoIIRC the janitors have very few powers, similar to forum moderators on most forums. I suppose you could claim the admins are helping, but personally, I'd only consider people who directly work on the site's backend/frontend management and development, not unpaid community managers.
- Weltschmerz 14y agoJanitors do have very few powers. Yet it turns out to be an awful lot of work to moderate a site as open and popular as 4chan.org. Without janitors, you can be sure that the site would consist of predominantly spam & child porn, and probably couldn't continue to exist, for reasons legal or otherwise. But you're right; creatively speaking, the entity is "run" by Poole and probably a handful of contractors.
- JohnTheRipper 14y agoWell, you could say the same of any forum. I volunteer as a moderator on a rather large forum, it's not quite as large as 4chan but it's among the largest on the internet... It's a lot of work, but we're not the ones running the site itself, we're just volunteers who help out with community moderation. And the work is spread among a lot of volunteers.
- dumbfounder 14y agoAbsolutely, that makes it all the more impressive to me.
- stfu 14y agoThe question is always to what degree others are contributing to a website so it is still run by a "single" person. In most cases there might be a person checking in on the servers on a regular basis that is paid through the hosting fee, etc. Plus there are not dictatorships on the internet. People vote with their feet and are, especially on an anonymous site such as 4chan not locked in, like they are with Facebook profile/networks. If there were something describable as dictatorships on the internet, I would argue that it is those sites that try to impose their own values and judgments on their members, and not 4chan (and to a minor degree reddit), which (in most parts) only rule is to avoid completely illegal themes.
- Weltschmerz 14y agoI see your point, however, unlike a platform such as Reddit, the available categories under which you may post content are decided upon or terminated by Poole. There is an implicit democracy, where contributing content constitutes endorsement of the platform, but I think you will find that many decisions Poole has made on behalf of 4chan were unpopular. I'm not suggesting that truly democratic internet communities even exist, but 4chan is much farther from that ideal than Reddit. But what 4chan has is _privacy_.
- indiecore 14y ago> I'm not suggesting that truly democratic internet communities even exist, but 4chan is much farther from that ideal than Reddit. I disagree. 4chan is if anything more democratic than most sites even if it is a sort of semi-anarchic mob rule version of democracy. The first thing I'd like to counter is the idea that the available categories are determined by the 4chan admins and by moot in particular. It is true that he's the one who makes new boards to talk about specific subjects but that doesn't mean that if there isn't a board it doesn't get talked about, generally it'll happen in whatever board has the most users interested in that subject, and if it becomes a problem or starts taking over the board there will be a general purpose board spun off for that subject in particular. Examples of this (in the positive "lots of people are talking about this and need a space) are /tg/ which spun off from warhammer wednesday on /b/ and /lit/ and /toy/ were both spun off from recurring topics on /tg/. Less positive examples include /soc/ and /adv/ which were supposed to clean up /r9k/ and /mlp/ because pony threads were a huge problem on /co/. I think the problem here is that Reddit's (and HN's for that matter) "democracy" function is explicitly part of the site whilst 4chan's is hidden and based on the whims of the audience.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ntulip 14y agookcupid.com was for a long time.
- minikites 14y agoI thought that was founded by several people? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okcupid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okcupid Created by Chris Coyne, Sam Yagan, Christian Rudder and Max Krohn
- citricsquid 14y agoOkCupid’s founders (Chris Coyne, Christian Rudder, Sam Yagan and Max Krohn) From wikipedia, seems it was never just one person. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OkCupid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OkCupid
- seanlinehan 14y agoYou are mistaken, but it's a fair mistake. You were probably thinking of Plenty of Fish which was run by one guy for a long time.
- sayemm 14y agoInteresting post by Markus Frind on just that, "Digital 100, most valuable boot strapped company" - http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/digital-100-most-valuable-boot-strapped-company/ http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/digital-100-mos...
- Zaheer 14y agoI have a site that get 1.5 million monthly uniques according to GA as well.
- stbtrax 14y agoImgur until somewhat recently was run by an individual.
- joe_bleau 14y agoDrudge report?
- seanlinehan 14y agoTwicsy is sort of NSFW for anybody who make check it out. Some naked breasts just popped up on my screen in public. Not exactly an ideal outcome, though not unexpected for a "trending" section on a Twitter picture search engine.
- ry 14y agoDrudge Report VISITS TO DRUDGE 11/27/12 033,621,596 PAST 24 HOURS 1,218,005,142 PAST 31 DAYS 11,345,750,362 PAST YEAR
- dumbfounder 14y agoWikipedia has their employees at 2, but wow, those are amazing stats.
- tolos 14y agoThat's not what their "please donate" campaign told me.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Wilduck 14y agoWikipedia has two listed as the number of Drudge Report's employees. I mixed this up the first time I read it as well.
- peteforde 14y agoWikiMedia (which oversees WikiPedia) has 143 employees, according to CrunchBase.
- hm8 14y agoSome stats! Obvious fact: The numbers are roughly proportional. The same crowd come to drudge report on a daily basis without fail. Might look to be overly ambitious claim but the reality might not be far from it.
- citricsquid 14y agoI've heard of Drudge Report before, but never really understood it. Who / what does it cater to and what is its function, a sort of one-man curated news reddit?
- kayge 14y agoI think Matthew Inman from TheOatmeal.com does pretty well. According to Wiki (not the best source, I know) : "As of 2010, the website got an average of 4.6 million unique visitors and more than 20 million page views a month."
- dumbfounder 14y agoThat is a good one, does anyone have recent stats for them?
- petervandijck 14y agoGets 12 million pageviews on Comscore. That's really good.
- noblethrasher 14y agoHacker News is (was?) mostly run by one person and, about a year ago, was getting over 2.4 million uniques per month and 26 million page views. Source: http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html
- wallawe 14y agoHow does Twicsy do revenue wise? I would love to hear the story behind it and how you got to that many users.
- dumbfounder 14y agoRevenue is abysmal. No decent networks will advertise on Twicsy due to the adult content. Up until about 2 months ago I couldn't even cover server costs with the ad money. As for the story: I launched it back in 2009 as a last ditch effort to save my company (Searchles) and was featured on TechCrunch a few times that first week. But, since then, the coverage has been almost nonexistent. I have relied on organic growth, SEO, and old fashioned, bullheaded persistence since then. It has grown about 5x each of the past 3 years. I have been running it in my spare time since March of 2010, and I am not the world's greatest web developer, so almost all improvements have been on the back end just trying to scale the site. If you are interested in the tech: I run MySQL on a 2TB SSD RAID 5 array, but then I use data caching servers I developed myself to speed up serving the site (some data in memory, most on SSD). The near real time search was also developed by me. Only 4 total servers are used to run the site.
- bemmu 14y agoAre you subscribing to the paid Twitter firehose, or how do you get the data? If you could find any feature at all to charge for, you might be surprised to find people signing up. For example you could have "featured tweets" with a retweet button underneath on the right side instead of (or in addition to) the ad block and charge for placement there for people who want their content to be more popular.
- zemo 14y ago>No decent networks will advertise on Twicsy due to the adult content. does the "possibly_sensitive" attribute in the Twitter API help at all? I ask because I'm looking into using it on a project, but I don't have enough source data to be able to tell how accurate it is.
- dumbfounder 14y ago
- centdev 14y agoI run a site that generates 300m pvs on mobile web, 100m pvs on desktop with 2.7m uniques every month (I believe this is actually substantially higher but not fully tracked in Google Analytics for some reason).
- dumbfounder 14y agoWhat is the site? Are those pageview numbers monthly?
- centdev 14y agoThe numbers are monthly and its based on twitter
- dumbfounder 14y agoI am curious about your site, if you want to share via email you can reach me at chris at twicsy.youknowhat
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- dschiptsov 14y ago4chan
- gprasanth 14y agoI block google analytics, and I think many others too do so(yay! for ghostery). You probably are getting a little(lot?) more visitors than what ga says.
- pbhjpbhj 14y agoUnder what definition. Do they need to just run the content, does having [significant] UGC count as being self-run (I'd warrant not [+ what is significant]). Do they have to run it all down to the bare metal or is a managed server environment allowed. What about regular colo'? Does the site have to run it's own DNS. No man['s website] is an island.
- velodrome 14y agoI started a message board service for a few years back. The service had 35-40M pv/mo, 10-12M unique/mo, and more than 1.2M users. Also, the site was in the Alexa 1000 for a few months before it was sold. I was the only engineer on the project. We had 5-10 volunteers to help support our service (general help, technical support, etc). So, to say I ran the service myself would be a lie.
- dumbfounder 14y agoIf you have built such a strong community that people are willing to help out for free I think that is much more impressive than being able to claim you did it all by yourself.
- entropy_ 14y agoThey just posted this notice: Google Play is currently experiencing very high traffic. Nexus 4 is not sold out and will still be available for purchase. Please try again shortly. Thank you for your patience. There is hope yet
- dangrossman 14y agoI run W3Counter which tracks over 100 million page views a month. Every load involves both reading from and writing to a database, and about 50% of the time, dynamic image generation... so no CDNs or response caching.