HN accounts for 12% of Social Bookmark referral traffic
readwriteweb.comNote: I work on Woopra projects :-) This data is sounds biased. Delicious did in the BILLIONS of monthly PVs when I left - I really doubt HN throws more traffic in aggregate. Their numbers do sound high. HN gets about 60k unique visitors on weekdays. We used to have about 750k pageviews on weekdays, but I just cracked down on crawlers that were killing performance, and the number is closer to 650k now. I've heard from several people that HN is a source of referral traffic out of proportion to its size, presumably because its concentration means more articles are interesting to more readers. But it would have to be a traffic source way out of proportion to its size to get the kind of numbers they're quoting in this study. Yeah, this just shows that they have an install base hugely skewed towards sites that techies read. That doesn't explain why slashdot is 0% though. I don't read slashdot anymore. Do you? phrack4lyfe
greetz2hnn I've had 2 or 3 occasions that I've had a post which was the most popular on both HN and delicious at the same time. The stats here sound reasonably correct. I'd need to dig in deeper though, but I can certainly say HN drives more traffic. The real question I guess is: Is this comparing apples to oranges (popular on hn vs popular on delicious). Anybody else thinking we should be alarmed at this kind of data - because of the spammers and self-promoters who will flock to HN, I mean... That was my first thought, keep a low profile ! Maybe we should go back to pushing Erlang submissions to the top of the first page again? 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 comments still drive traffic (though not as much as links that add value and create discussion). I suspect that getting a lot of visits from 'Hacker News' doesn't sound very comfortable to many people. Yes, I note the OP refers to YCombinator rather than Hacker News, but as the profile of both grow outside of the tech community not making the distinction will become more and more inaccurate. to many (dumb) people. the 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. Then for the few legitimate remaining articles, I'll postulate that reddit users go to comment after only reading the headline and never follow the link of the article. Maybe HN readers are more diligent and do read/visit the articles more often. that's just the front page though. Reddit has a ton of subreddits...which people subscribe to. When they do, the stories from that subreddit show up on your main page. 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. Indeed. Speaking as someone who has had several articles at the top of HN and reddit-programming, as well as several on proper reddit as well as digg: it's total nonsense. I'll get 5-10k hits, for a "decent" HN story, I'll get 20k+ for proggit. For a #1 HN story, I'll get maybe 20k hits, and 40k+ for a #1 proggit. Top-level front-page reddit is pushing 100k. Here's an example of the traffic of a recent article that got both HN and proggit: http://imgur.com/TpQ5T Obviously, n=1 here, but this pattern repeats all the time. 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. 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. When people get into discussions about the meaning of social bookmarking, I often giggle remembering an early del user who wrote in to complain about the inappropriateness of some of the links because he thought 'social bookmarking' meant 'bookmarks on social issues'. Check the 'saved' link on your profile page. So, yes, you can return to those pages at a later point in time. I'm not even sure how to get stuff on or off that list. Again, in what way can you use this site as your bookmarks? You save an obscure documentation page and a mod deletes it, and then what? HN (like digg, reddit, etc) is social news, or something. People who confuse the two think so because the delicious front page and digg looked similar, or whatever. Obscure documentation pages are most likely not going to survive, I agree with you there. But I definitely do use it to 'bookmark' technology news and it is very rare that a link gets deleted. The bigger risk for deletions seems to be not tech related stuff but rather non-tech related stuff that manages to get a couple of upvotes. HN is social news simply because the audience can define it as such. The main ingredients, the ability to post links and to discuss them and to revisit them at a later stage makes it such that some users will come by and use it in that way. All the stuff you submit and upvote goes on that list, you can't remove stuff from the list if you've upvoted it, you can't remove stuff from the list after a certain time has passed. Since when are discussions necessary for social bookmarking? Delicious doesn't have this. Like I said, it's a forum. They're not necessary but they don't hurt either. As the coiner of the term, you may want to update the wikipedia article which, after listing the basic requirements says: "As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks". So there seems to be a convergence of terms and services here. I think the major difference between social bookmarking sites (of which I see HN as one, and you obviously don't) versus a forum is that on a forum the vast majority of the topics is not started with a link. On HN the vast majority of the topics is started with a link. Can you please provide a definition for social bookmarking that includes the uses you are but is also not overlapping with other things? (Otherwise, you wouldn't need the term as distinct from other definitions, obviously.) The confusion stems from when Kevin Rose started calling Digg social bookmarking to help raise VC, and was adopted by people who are only understanding superficially (the front pages look kinda similar, so clearly they're the same thing!) Kevin then stopped using the term. I think you either understand this superficially as well. There are many things that I could use to serve some obscure purpose without that being the primary purpose. Or perhaps you are just trolling. I think the term 'social bookmarking' has expanded from its initial, narrow definition of 'a service where you can bookmark stuff and share those bookmarks with others and potentially tag them' to the point where the general public will interpret it as to be wide enough to include sites like /., digg, reddit and HN, whereas before that time it was limited to sites like furl, diigoo and deliciou.us. Witness the title of this article. For me the key element is that the majority of the discussions use a link as the topic starter. I understand that initially the definition was a more narrow one, but since this seems to be the way people use it nowadays I'll just go with the flow, I have no vested interest in seeing the definition being used in one way or another. To me a 'forum' is a site where people will come to discuss a subject, occasionally using links to illustrate the point. I think that it is not very friendly to try to label someone that is having a fairly long conversation with you a troll just because you apparently disagree with them. It's more your weak use of logic and lack of supporting points makes me think you are trying to make me annoyed rather than prove your point. I do not think that "it has links to start discussions" make it a social bookmarking site. I think it is bookmarking + public that make it a social bookmarking site. HN is a forum and a social news site. Delicious is social bookmarking and maybe a weak social news site, but not a forum. Slashdot, also mentioned in the article, is DEFINITELY not a social bookmarking site. Surely you agree with this? Incidentally, I picked a random forum, and looked at a few items. They all seemed to be started around links: http://www.r8talk.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=fa7531fdc42e... 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. This 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. Useful 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). Argh misleading stupid 3d graphs! Considering that Social Networking site data is skewed due to not accounting for apps, could it be possible that is happening in the Social Bookmark space as well? Do Reddit and Slashdot have iPhone/Android apps? The reason why slashdot.org shows no traffic driven is because most visitors there know to block their referer. People still use StumbleUpon?