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HN accounts for 12% of Social Bookmark referral traffic

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Re: HN accounts for 12% of Social Bookmark referral traffic

#15

Post by jacquesm »

joshu wrote: post #14

Hn is not a social bookmarking website.

HN 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.

Re: HN accounts for 12% of Social Bookmark referral traffic

#16

Post by jacquesm »

ars wrote: post #11

Wow, slashdot has really fallen far. I know that I personally hardly read it anymore, but I used to read it many times per day.

Slashdot 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.

Re: HN accounts for 12% of Social Bookmark referral traffic

#17

Post by joshu »

jacquesm wrote: post #15
joshu wrote: post #14

Hn is not a social bookmarking website.

HN 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.

It'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.

Re: HN accounts for 12% of Social Bookmark referral traffic

#18

Post by statictype »

JacobAldridge wrote: post #3

I 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 comment…

I suspect that getting a lot of visits from 'Hacker News' doesn't sound very comfortable to many people.

Re: HN accounts for 12% of Social Bookmark referral traffic

#19

Post by dotcoma »

statictype wrote: post #18
JacobAldridge wrote: post #3

I 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 comment…

I suspect that getting a lot of visits from 'Hacker News' doesn't sound very comfortable to many people.

to many (dumb) people.
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