

Ask PG: What's the traffic effect here from the TechCrunch mention? - robg

Would you mind quantifying some numbers based on the TC front page treatment - before and after?<p>Pageviews?
New users?
Submissions?
Comments?
Anything else interesting?
======
pg
We got 14k unique ips yesterday, which without TC would have been 10k. The
effect of the spike was diminished by being spread over 2 days, because we use
GMT days for stats.

The most dramatic change was the number of new accounts. There were 258 new
accounts in the last 24 hours. On a typical day there are 50-60.

The most interesting thing to me was that the TC traffic exposed a design flaw
in the account creation code. That's why the site got so slow yesterday.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133804>

~~~
webwright
Hopefully this will help dispel the myth that TechCrunch coverage is a "get-
coverage-or-die" issue for startups. Getting on it is great, and the splash
coverage from it is important.

But 4,000 uniques just isn't going to do it unless your site/service is TRULY
viral. If it is, then you should be able to take off with 100 uniques just as
well (if a little more slowly).

~~~
pg
Being on TC isn't just important for the numbers. It's who those people are. I
suspect practically every startup investor reads TC, for example. That's not a
factor for News.YC, but for the average startup those are good people to have
know about you.

Also, the traffic boost is probably ordinarily more than 4k uniques. We
probably have a fairly big overlap with TC readers.

~~~
webwright
Traffic boost is not normally much more than 4k in my experience. I've had two
startups on TC (multiple times each) and worked at a third startup that also
got coverage. Ranged between 3.5k and 7k uniques (so you're right-- it's on
the low side).

Regarding investors, I think you might be right there-- TC coverage probably
helped our YC app, for example (you'd know more than I!). But, in
conversations with investors, I've NEVER had one say "Oh yeah-- I saw you guys
on TechCrunch." It's a nice bullet point in an email/execsum that lends
credibility.

Arrington literally has talked about founders calling him crying and begging
for coverage and busting into his house to plead with him. That just seems
wrong to me.

~~~
thorax
To provide an opposing anecdote, our startup literally got direct
contacts/calls from VCs specifically due to our coverage on TechCrunch.

We had been front page on Digg and that got us a crazy number of uniques, but
the initial VC interest did not start until we were on TechCrunch and
Lifehacker a week or two later.

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engtech
I just took a look at my referrers for the past year on my blog. Without a
doubt 90% of referrers are social bookmarking sites like this and reddit.

It might be the psychology of it all. You visit a social bookmarking site to
find interesting links; you visit a blog to see what they have to say more
than click on the links.

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michaelneale
I hope its not the beginning of the enditt.

