

Profit from frontpaging HN and Reddit - what now? - RiderOfGiraffes
http://yieldthought.com/post/1477902830/37-91-from-frontpaging-hn-and-reddit-what-now/

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sga
The author of this post submitted it 45 days ago:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1869264>

Interesting how the luck of getting noticed on the new page is so important to
getting engagement. I wonder if in this case it's the difference in titles.

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J3L2404
DupDetector dropped the ball on this one. ;)

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user24
ironic, since this was actually submitted by RiderOfGiraffes - the user behind
DupDetector!

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J3L2404
Hence the ;)

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user24
ah - I wasn't sure.

;)

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aaronbrethorst
No referrer has typically corresponded to Twitter clients in my experience.
Given the volume of discussion of the post on Twitter, this seems like the
most likely explanation.

There is the occasional Twitter client that does set a referrer value, like
Twitterific, but most seem to skip this.

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akronim
Do they set the user agent?

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dmitri1981
Does anyone know what the stats app used is? Thanks.

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true_religion
I was wondering the same thing. Turns out that he's using Analytk, a project
that he created himself.

Here's what it appears to do:

1\. A referrer information is gathered on each page hit via javascript and
submitted to his server

2\. The Analytics page uses Ajax to grab the aggregated data, then charts it
using the Google Charts API

That's it. At first I was really interested in it because its beautiful, but
on a second look it doesn't do anything that Google Analytics doesn't already
do except easily show you referrals from a set of sites that you care about.

~~~
moconnor
I wrote it because it gives me real time tracking for posts that have just
been published. Initially it updates every minute, which is really fascinating
to see. The rate of hits once the site is picked up by HN or Reddit is a
_very_ strong predictor of it's final page view count.

The graphs get a bit pointless after a day or two, though. If people are
interested in playing around with analytk then maybe I'll open it up to URLs
from elsewhere and work down some of my 'to do' features, like 'show me just
the day/week'.

Thanks for the beauty vote, I wrote it to look great on my iPhone :-)

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StavrosK
No matter what, you are my ideal weekend project success story, for making
something useful, relatively easy to write and very fun.

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sushrutbidwai
I would advice to look at seo and landing page strategies. also try optimizely
for a/b testing.

~~~
moconnor
Thanks, I'm struggling to justify adding a/b testing vs all the other things I
could do with the same amount of time (e.g. add social proof etc.)

Also it took me a long time to realize I can a/b test amazon conversions by
using multiple affiliate ids... ;)

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bemmu
The traffic itself is temporary, but the random backlinks the site got from
the brief awareness should be good for seo. When I submitted my now-defunct
expired domain name related site and got a similar treatment, it pushed me
nearly to the top for the term "expired domain names" on Google.

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Charuru
>Strangely, most of the traffic to the game site is ‘direct’, which can mean
almost anything in analytics. Privacy-aware browsers, links sent thorough
offline email programs, who knows? Not Google, that’s for sure:

Direct means 4chan, just fyi

