Note: I work on Woopra projects :-)
HN accounts for 12% of Social Bookmark referral traffic
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HN accounts for 12% of Social Bookmark referral traffic
1–10 of 46 posts
Re: HN accounts for 12% of Social Bookmark referral traffic
#2This wasn't at all surprising to me. HN has a great community of tech enthusiasts who have a insatiable appetite for tech content. I'm sure the people who ask for critiques on their web apps get a nice traffic boost.
Re: HN accounts for 12% of Social Bookmark referral traffic
#3I 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 comments still drive traffic (though not as much as links that add value and create discussion).
Re: HN accounts for 12% of Social Bookmark referral traffic
#4the fact that they have HN as having 2.4 times more referrer traffic than reddit makes me question this.
Look at the numbers, HN is a top 3,000 site, reddit is a top 300 site.
Re: HN accounts for 12% of Social Bookmark referral traffic
#5Argh misleading stupid 3d graphs!
Re: HN accounts for 12% of Social Bookmark referral traffic
#6the fact that they have HN as having 2.4 times more referrer traffic than reddit makes me question this. Look at the numbers, HN is a top 3,000 site, reddit is a top 300 site.
There is less motion on HN vs. Reddit. You'll usually get up to 3 full pages of new stories a day on Reddit (depending on the number of subreddits you subscribe to) and there is also a fracturing of the community around subreddits. HN is one single stream of content that has many stories on the first page for the entire day. Essentially, HN is a subreddit to itself.
Re: HN accounts for 12% of Social Bookmark referral traffic
#7the fact that they have HN as having 2.4 times more referrer traffic than reddit makes me question this. Look at the numbers, HN is a top 3,000 site, reddit is a top 300 site.
There is less motion on HN vs. Reddit. You'll usually get up to 3 full pages of new stories a day on Reddit (depending on the number of subreddits you subscribe to) and there is also a fracturing of the community around subreddits. HN is one single stream of content that has many stories on the first page for the entire day. Essentially, HN is a subreddit to itself.
That shouldn't matter, they are just measuring pure volume on the other side. HN users may read more stories than Reddit users, but I wouldn't assume that.
Re: HN accounts for 12% of Social Bookmark referral traffic
#8the fact that they have HN as having 2.4 times more referrer traffic than reddit makes me question this. Look at the numbers, HN is a top 3,000 site, reddit is a top 300 site.
Maybe a bias in who installs their measurement tools. One huge programming or startup site (techcrunch?) might be skewing the numbers towards hacker news, which could believably drive more tech-news readers than reddit.
Re: HN accounts for 12% of Social Bookmark referral traffic
#9the fact that they have HN as having 2.4 times more referrer traffic than reddit makes me question this. Look at the numbers, HN is a top 3,000 site, reddit is a top 300 site.
http://www.raterush.com/pages/digg-reddit might explain this somewhat.
A huge chunk of reddit links are back to reddit, to imgur and to things like major newspapers and youtube. If only a few of these are not actually tracked by Woopra, the results would get skewed significantly.
Re: HN accounts for 12% of Social Bookmark referral traffic
#10Useful data, thanks! I'm a little disappointed the pie charts don't include 'Other', which would have given a sense of how long the tail is.
Regarding the seeming discrepancy in data for Google's share, the reasons are probably: (i) more of Bing/Yahoo's traffic stays within their portals than Google's does, and (ii) Google is especially dominant among tech-savvy users, and the websites that were analyzed have proportionally more of such users (which would also explain why HN shows up).