

The HN Effect in Numbers - hoop
http://blog.charleshooper.net/the-hn-effect-in-numbers

======
_delirium
It'd be interesting if there were a way to measure proportion of visitors from
different sources who engaged, by some definition of engagement. Ideally I
want to know "read the article", but that's hard to measure. Number of new
feed subscriptions might be a decent proxy for "read and really liked the
article", though.

One reason I want to know that is that for my own sites, I've generally found
a large proportion of link-blog traffic to be very shallow, to the point where
maybe one in 100 hits is a "real" hit. This is particularly the case at link-
blogs without any summary blurbs. Slashdotters who don't want to read the
article, for example, often just read the blurb and don't bother to click
through, so a bigger proportion of those who do click through are at least
somewhat interested in reading. A much larger percentage of people on sites
like Reddit click through, but I don't think a much larger percentage actually
read the articles; many are just clicking through to figure out what the
article's about, since there's no blurb to explain it. And some don't even do
that much, since a common Reddit use pattern is "middle-click on every article
to open in new tab, then work through the tabs", often culminating in just
closing the remaining still-unread tabs when you're done reddit-surfing, which
results in a ton of spurious hits that involved no human eyeballs.

Anecdotally, the proportion of shallow-hits/not-even-real-hits goes up
somewhat proportionally to traffic. Front-page of reddit delivers maybe 100x
as much traffic as front-page of a more niche sub-reddit, but _much_ less than
100x real readership.

~~~
riffer
I can share a little data. Yesterday we got 7157 uniques for this:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1627619>

It has 76 votes, so that's pretty close to the 10 HN votes -> 1k uniques rule
of thumb

Of those 7157, 602 clicked on at least one of two links at the bottom of the
blog post to do more on the site, but I'd be surprised if more than a handful
return in the future (other than thru another blog post).

~~~
_delirium
My own data for a recent /r/programming submission:

Around 3500 uniques, from net +35 score (50 upvotes, 15 downvotes), of which
around 200 clicked through to something else on the site (even if only loading
the domain's root page), and around 100 clicked through to at least one other
article. Seems like ratios in the same ballpark.

Unfortunately, it's still hard to tell how much of that is substantial
engagement. I can imagine a decent number of people skimmed the first article,
clicked to see what else was on the site, skimmed another article, lost
interest and left, especially since reading reddit puts you in a sort of "idly
click on things" mood, at least in my experience. I did get one email about
the article with some thought-provoking comments, so that puts a lower bound
of one engaged reader. ;-)

~~~
Encosia
> Unfortunately, it's still hard to tell how much of that is substantial
> engagement.

A pinging stats provider, like Clicky, gives you great insight into single-
pageview engagement.

It's true that there's room for inaccuracy in the pinging measure. Some
viewers with third-party (or all) JavaScript disabled won't be counted,
viewers that leave the page open in a tab before they look at it may be over-
counted, and readers who legitimately spend more than ten minutes reading a
longer page are capped at the ten minute mark. However, averaging that across
thousands of views is a very worthwhile measure of engagement.

I had a relevant post about that here recently (which was castigated for
semantics more than it was actually discussed, unfortunately):
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1294969>

The Clicky pinging data was invaluable then too. HN visitors to that post show
an abysmal 95% bounce rate and an average 14s time-on-site in Google
Analytics. Meanwhile, Clicky shows those same HN visitors spending an average
of 3m29s time-on-site and truly bouncing from the page only 12.9% of the time.
Even if you assume Clicky's numbers are wildly optimistic, it's nice to have
that alternate insight.

------
hoop
I've been trying to see if I can fairly-accurately match the number of
visitors I had with some type of mathematical expression. As I pointed out in
the article, the decay looks exponential.

I've gotten closer with f(x) = 2658e^(-0.94)+30, but as x approaches infinity
(or even 5) it starts to full apart. Any one good with the maths who wants to
take a look?

I decided with this one to throw out the first datapoint (the day my site
launched) since it was likely still growing during this period of (overall)
decay. How significant is this?

The actual numbers: [2688, 1065, 452, 206, 138, 105] My function's numbers:
[2688, 1068, 436, 188, 91, 54]

For easy playing:
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=table[+2658e^%28-0.94x%...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=table\[+2658e^%28-0.94x%29+%2B+30%2C+{x%2C0%2C5}+)]

------
holman
The numbers from when I've been on HN is similar to yours. Traffic itself
isn't super important to me, though; mostly I'm just happy knowing the people
coming in from Hacker News might end up following me on Twitter, following me
on GitHub, or just generally retweet and reblog my stuff. It's a great crew.

Hacker News may not generate as many clicks as Digg would, but visitors from
here are way more interesting to me.

------
cperciva
Good to see that HN Daily shows up in the referers, even if it is just 1% of
the direct HN numbers -- I really had no idea how many people would end up
using it, but it seems that there's a few people at least.

~~~
jacquesm
It varies quite a bit actually, on some postings as much as 5%, others around
1%.

edit: It looks like the higher the original is voted the fewer people will
visit through HN daily, which suggests that people use it more to see if
they've missed something than to look at just HN daily.

edit2: > I really had no idea how many people would end up using it, but it
seems that there's a few people at least.

That's a curious statement, can't you tell from the logs?

~~~
cperciva
Thanks for the numbers. Yes, this did-I-miss-anything functionality is how I
was hoping it would be used -- good to hear that it's working!

~~~
jacquesm
I don't think 1 to 5% is bad at all considering how long you've been live with
that and that it is not backlinked from HN in any other way than the
announcement.

Probably referrer logs are one of your main sources of new visitors.

------
deltapoint
If you're post is only on the new section and never makes the front page it
will still get a bit of traffic.

[http://abiekatz.com/2010/08/20/introducing-a-new-theory-
the-...](http://abiekatz.com/2010/08/20/introducing-a-new-theory-the-
recommendularity/)

It got 5 karma points and 29 page views from Hacker News.

So making the front page is very important for getting traffic from HN. I am
sure this is the case for any social news site.

