Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What difference does being a top story on Hacker News make? Stats and Facts...

blog.freshdesk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 24 posts

Re: What difference does being a top story on Hacker News make? Stats and Facts...

#11

Post by GrantS »

thecoffman wrote: post #8

This seems pretty much in line with my own numbers. I had a post get to the front page for about ~36 hours and held one of the top few spots for a couple hours. Over approximately 48 hours, I got ~35k uniques, approximately 18k were from Hacker News directly, with the bulk of the remainder coming from Twitter. Many of those twitter referrals came from people RTing HN aggregator feeds and the like though, so in realit…

To provide another data point, I had a top story one day in January of this year, with about 5,000 visitors linking straight from Hacker News and about 10,000 total unique visits for the day.

I wonder if the variance is primarily due to the topic itself, day of the week, or if the community has grown significantly in recent weeks.

Re: What difference does being a top story on Hacker News make? Stats and Facts...

#12

Post by orijing »

I'm curious: What impact did that have on your servers/infrastructure? Do you use some sort of elastic resource like EC2? Do you manage your own server? How did the server handle the load?

Thanks a lot for the information, and congratulations on your product :)

Re: What difference does being a top story on Hacker News make? Stats and Facts...

#13

Post by thecoffman »

GrantS wrote: post #11
thecoffman wrote: post #8

This seems pretty much in line with my own numbers. I had a post get to the front page for about ~36 hours and held one of the top few spots for a couple hours. Over approximately 48 hours, I got ~35k uniques, approximately 18k were from Hacker News directly, with the bulk of the remainder coming from Twitter. Many of those twitter referrals came from people RTing HN aggregator feeds and the like though, so in realit…

To provide another data point, I had a top story one day in January of this year, with about 5,000 visitors linking straight from Hacker News and about 10,000 total unique visits for the day. I wonder if the variance is primarily due to the topic itself, day of the week, or if the community has grown significantly in recent weeks.

That's a very good question, it may have to do with time of day or overall business of HN at the time the story peaked. For instance - my story held that position for that long with a little over 100 votes IIRC whereas the submission in this story has well over 200. Naturally one would expect the 200 vote submission to get more traffic despite having a similar frontpage lifespan. It seems as if position isn't the only determining factor in pageviews, time of day is also significant.

All of this is fairly obvious when you think about it, but nice to see data to back it up.

Re: What difference does being a top story on Hacker News make? Stats and Facts...

#15

Post by noahc »

For me the biggest takeaway on this is the fact that putting something out there early and often. Once it is out there the market can judge it for its value that it presents. In the case of fresh desk that appears to be huge. It is amazing what a few simple blog posts can do. It always amazes me all the opportunities that present them selves when you put something high quality out into the world.

Re: What difference does being a top story on Hacker News make? Stats and Facts...

#16

Post by wahnfrieden »

tokenadult wrote: post #6
keiferski wrote: post #2

Something I've always wondered: assuming all other things (connections, community, alumni, funding, etc.) being equal, does YC win out over other "incubators" simply because of Hacker News? YC startups (quite rightly) get on the front page easily, which obviously drives a lot of traffic. Most other "incubators" don't have anything comparable.

Something I've always wondered: assuming all other things (connections, community, alumni, funding, etc.) being equal, does YC win out over other "incubators" simply because of Hacker News? There are at least two ways the HN online community could provide an advantage to YC and the YC-funded companies. I will mention the one that is most salient to me first: it seems to me that HN is an interesting online community i…

Nice response, but I think people do still reflexively upvote links for having "(YC11)" etc. in the title.

Re: What difference does being a top story on Hacker News make? Stats and Facts...

#17

Post by girishm »

orijing wrote: post #12

I'm curious: What impact did that have on your servers/infrastructure? Do you use some sort of elastic resource like EC2? Do you manage your own server? How did the server handle the load? Thanks a lot for the information, and congratulations on your product :)

Our website is hosted on Linode with nginx and our blog is on posterous. The infrastructure was rock solid. Nothing gave us any scares.

Re: What difference does being a top story on Hacker News make? Stats and Facts...

#18

Post by pitdesi »

Thanks for the stats, that is absolutely incredible! Hackernews zindabad!

If anyone cares, FeeFighters got 191 visits to http://feefighters.com from the link in your post, representing one of our higher referring sites for a couple of days

Re: What difference does being a top story on Hacker News make? Stats and Facts...

#20

Post by Stormbringer »

idlewords wrote: post #19

I look forward to the infinite recursion of follow-up posts.

Don't encourage them :D

Can anybody provide the TL:DR version? Lots of odd looking graphs from some traffic reporting program I'm not familiar with and tiny little text.

Post reply on HN