Effects of a Hacker News Submission

Yesterday I started this blog. I made one post on it, titled Preventing Screen Scraping. I learned a bit about things to improve in my blogging process in the future, but anyway…. I did one thing to promote the blog, I went and submitted it to Hacker News. I honestly had no idea whether the post would take off or not. Lucky for me it did, which might I say is quite an adrenaline rush. I believe it climbed as high as #2 or #3, not sure exactly which. I realize this type of post has probably been done before, but I think this provides a bit of a unique perspective as I launched this blog the day that my post took off.

I didn’t tweet it, post it on Facebook, tell someone, anything. The full effects haven’t 100% taken place, but last hour, I was down to about 40 visitors. I think its safe to assume that at most there will be a few hundred visitors more trickling down. It was interesting to watch the link spread across different social mediums and websites. Only 65% of the total traffic originated from Hacker News owned URLs. The rest came from various aggregators, readers, and social networks. I don’t think I realized exactly how popular Hacker News was until I’d seen all the effects filter through on my own website.

As you can see it resulted in a bit more than 10,000 visitors and 43 comments on post.

The top 5 referral mediums behind Hacker News:

22% of visitors came from a mobile device. Wow

I’ve included several different screenshots below for your viewing pleasure. If you have any more questions about the data I’d be happy to share, just post in the comments below.