

Latest HN traffic stats: 100k uniques on weekdays, 1.1m pageviews - pg
http://www.ycombinator.com/images/hntraffic-2apr11.png

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chaosmachine
Just for fun, I made a comparison with the data from Google Trends:

<http://i.imgur.com/T1H1C.png>

Google is actually pretty close, although the last few months are off.

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bemmu
Here's (updated) Alexa: <http://i.imgur.com/Tw8mh.png>

According to alexa "daily reach", traffic from Mar 2009 to Mar 2011 went from
reach ~0.0137 to reach ~0.104, so I scaled the Alexa graph to show ~7.9x more
absolute uniques in the end than in the beginning.

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elliottcarlson
What better way to avoid all the compete/quantcast speculative threads than to
just post the numbers. Wish we could get that from more hosts for comparative
reasons.

Any one know what conversations may have caused the massive spikes on uniques?

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pg
The biggest relative spike was when the HN thread about _why became the de
facto Internet condolence page.

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Mz
Can anyone give me the link to this? I've had an extremely eventful week/3
months and I have no idea what this is but suspect I would like to see it.

Thanks.

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zck
It's this link: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=773106> from 591 days
ago. It's the spike in August 2009, approximately doubling the unique IP
count. It's less impressive for pageview count, though.

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Mz
Thanks.

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6ren
The uniques look nicely exponential. I wonder how big the petri dish is,
before it gets saturated? I think it's pretty big. Potentially, _everyone_
would like to start a company. And there's arguments that that's how society's
going.

Some interesting spikes on the uniques - I'd expect they were caused by
something not on HN (e.g. a story in digg or a major newspaper), rather than
something on it.

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dbirider
Unfortunately this also means that there's a lot more competition out there
and the game's getting harder.

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travisglines
I wonder how much traffic HN is cannibalizing from more traditional tech news
sources like venturebeat and techcrunch ...
[http://siteanalytics.compete.com/techcrunch.com+venturebeat....](http://siteanalytics.compete.com/techcrunch.com+venturebeat.com/?metric=uv&months=12)

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Swannie
Why post a link to compete.com when pg has just discredited as a source for
meaningful information?

A similar comparison on Google reflects little change for the others:

[http://trends.google.com/websites?q=news.ycombinator.com%2Ct...](http://trends.google.com/websites?q=news.ycombinator.com%2Ctechcrunch.com%2Cventurebeat.com%2Cmashable.com&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0)

That said, it relies on GoogleToolbar/Chrome, but we could argue that it's
distribution amongst visitors of those sites is going to be pretty similar.

Edit: Updated to include mashable.com

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travisglines
I agree totally, just was unaware of a better source of traffic data for the
two sites. (not every site publicly shares its data as willingly as pg does)

I'll probably be using Google trends in the future, thanks for the heads up.

After looking at the chart (assuming as Swannie does, that Google trends is a
significantly accurate source), it seems pretty apparent that HN doesn't have
enough traffic to cannibalize significant traffic from them.

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Swannie
Wow, nice graphs, great info, thanks.

