

Ask HN: How much traffic from a techcrunch story? - jshen

Does anyone know the amount of traffic a techcrunch story will generate for a site. Basically, what do I need to handle to not crash :)
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tstegart
<http://redeye.firstround.com/2008/01/after-the-techc.html> Not exact numbers,
but a start.

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jshen
"get tens of thousands of users from the "Techcrunch Bump""

I'm trying to figure out the time span for this. Is it tends of thousands in a
day? In an hour? What's the peak?

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tstegart
No, but I can tell you how much traffic a Hacker News post will get you.

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jshen
a lot less ;)

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tstegart
ha, exactly :) But I was serious, for whoever down-modded me. I kept track of
the hits I got after I made a post here, just to see for the future. How many
total/first hour/first day.

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jshen
so what were the numbers?

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tstegart
Launched via Hacker News only:

It was submitted at 12:54 pm on a Wednesday, received 54 hits in first hour.
First comment on HN appeared at 1:20 pm, after 27 hits. It got 68 page views
during the first 24 hours, and 0 after that. As you can see, almost all the
hits came during the first hour after submission, and drastically tapered off
after that. Also, none of the visitors subscribed to the RSS feed.

I theorize that there would have been more hits if:

1\. There were more comments. I think there were 3, and two were mine. Often,
a conversation in the comments can drive traffic

2\. There was more content. It was a blog, and I only had two or three posts.
I was looking for feedback on my idea, which was all in the first post, but
more content might have gotten people talking.

3\. There was accomplishment. Kind of a tricky one, when you’re looking for
feedback on an idea. A chicken or the egg problem. If I had put my idea into
practice and accomplished something and then posted, people would be talking.
But it can be helpful to get comments on an idea before you put it into
practice, so it was helpful that way to.

Basically, I'm not in a hurry to get things done, so this was a great
experiment for when I will be looking for press, hype or feedback. I'm taking
my time with my project, so I was very happy with my numbers overall. I will
actually be blogging about these numbers one of these days, because thats
basically what my idea is all about. Experimenting.

