

HackerNews Front-Page Funnel Analysis - tansey
http://blog.effectcheck.com/2011/04/11/hackernews-front-page-funnel-analysis/

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petenixey
When the "Dry erase HOPA" slideshow was revealed as a myth, the subsequent
interviews with the Resig brothers revealed how they always got two waves of
traffic from such hoaxes. The first is the hoax traffic, the second wave is
the wave of traffic about the hoax story.

I'm interested to see the increasing frequency of the "HN stats followup
article" describing the numbers from the traffic to the first article.

Despite the frequency this may still be an under-utilised property of HN. Why
not follow the recursion down the rabbit hole - and tell us how many signups
come from the followup article too? Perhaps bonus points for publishing a
chart of signups v. derivative index of article? I jest but honestly only
slightly.

~~~
tansey
> Why not follow the recursion down the rabbit hole

The thought did cross my mind. ;)

Seriously though, we plan on focusing the blog on analyzing press releases,
political speeches, and other text currently making headlines. We just were so
excited by the HN response that we thought this would make a great "Hello
World" post. I also think it's the only funnel analysis follow-up for a HN
submission; most usually focus just on page views and unique visitors.

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w1ntermute
> In descending order, the top browsers used by readers were:
    
    
        Chrome (52.97%)
        Firefox or Mozilla Compatible Agent (25.18%)
        Safari (23.71%)
        Internet Explorer (3.89%)
        Opera (2.79%)
    

Wow, that's pretty crazy - I didn't know Chrome had such a high market share.
Is this an accurate reflection of the browser market share on HN in general?

~~~
tansey
I just realized looking at these numbers that I used the # pageviews per
browser / total UVs to calculate those percentages. So if you're wondering why
they add up to > 100%, that's why. Just understand that the actual numbers are
roughly proportional to those I provided in the article.

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vessenes
This is fascinating to me, thanks for the data, and congrats!

One interesting comparison I have is the day I got my first web company's
first slashdot post, roughly 2000, maybe late 1999. I don't still have the
logs, but we had significantly more clickthroughs, on the order of 50 to 100k
if I recall correctly.

Given the HN 'pageview per day' numbers I've been reading, I find the
clickthrough rate surprisingly low; especially because the way I read HN is to
click through to almost everything on the homepage.

Other thoughts on this? It seems like a techcrunch or (even? slashdot) article
would be worth more, which surprises me. Well, techcrunch doesn't surprise me.
I guess I'm wondering what size / demographic community we're all in here.

~~~
Swizec
A lot of people come to HN for the commentary, not so much for the post. What
I've noticed is that I will usually read only the comments and only click
through to the page if it seems exceptionally interesting.

That is to say, the opinion of the HN crowd on a topic, matters more (and/or
is more useful) than the topic itself.

~~~
vessenes
Yes, I agree with this use case for HN completely, and it ties to my
experience.

Compared with say slashdot in 2000, interactivity is easier and generally more
interesting here. At the time, there were very few social aggregators, so the
use cases were different.

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leenewton
Nice analysis... sidenote: If you're measuring the emotional influence of
content on people, shouldn't it be "affectcheck"?

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Chrono
Nice write-up!

+1 for Monty Python reference. :)

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zyfo
Good write-up.

 _The unaccounted percentage can be chalked up to simply “other.”_

What does minus 8.54% other web browsers mean?

~~~
tansey
Sorry about that, as I noted in another comment, I used page views in the
numerator and unique visitors in the denominator. I've updated the article
with the appropriate percentages.

