Hacker News Frontpage Traffic Results: A Look Behind the Scenes

Hey guys,

As many of you know, my last blog post hit the front page of Hacker News on Wednesday, December 2 2009. We were super excited! Since many of you came from HN, I really want to thank all of you for taking the time to read my blog post.

The comments about my post on HN were a little hard on me, but I’m going to take it in stride and try to learn from the experience.

I have always been curious about how events like this would impact traffic. Well, now that I have a better idea, I wanted to share it with you guys and offer you a peek behind the curtain.

Here are some stats:

• ~8am CST submitted to HN
• ~9am CST made the HN frontpage
• ~1pm CST dropped off the HN frontpage
• ~4 hours on the HN frontpage

• 452 Unique visitors while on the HN Frontpage:
• 644 Total unique visitors on December 2, 2009
• 742 Total unique visitors since the morning of December 2
• 757 Total visits (so 15 visits were repeat visitors)
• 992 Total pageviews since the morning of December 2

To actually see the dramatic impact it had for us, look at the Google Analytics summary:

Sure, 992 pageviews is a mere blip on the radar for many sites, but notice the whopping zero pageviews we had before Wednesday and you can see why we’re so excited. All in all, I’d say it’s a great improvement.

On the down side, there was about an 85% bounce rate, but I've read that that's normal for the traffic from social news sites like HN.

But on the up side, we gained 8 new subscribers to the blog!

From FeedBurner:

We had 1 subscriber before December 2nd, but I secretly think it might have just been Robert stealth subscribing to motivate me. He denies it, but I have my doubts....

I know it’s not much, but for us it’s really exciting! The knowledge that our efforts are actually getting seen by people is wonderful. It helps so much to motivate us, especially while college finals are completely stressing us out.

I will do my best to continue to update the blog and the YakGroups Twitter. Thanks to everyone who checked out my last post; I'll do all I can to continue to improve and write some good content for you!

If you have any questions, comments, or something specific you’d like me to address, please don’t hesitate to write a comment here on the blog or on the YakGroups Twitter! I wish I had a YakGroups email account to post, but Robert says they are still “coming soon.”

Anyway, thanks again! Have a great weekend!