

Ask HN: What is the highest trafficked website run by an individual? - dumbfounder

I run Twicsy (twitter picture search) in my spare time by myself and receive over 5.5 million monthly unique visitors (current trailing month according to Google Analytics).<p>I am curious about what other large sites there are out there run by a single person? Is 4chan the biggest site run by one person?
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ry
Drudge Report

VISITS TO DRUDGE 11/27/12

033,621,596 PAST 24 HOURS 1,218,005,142 PAST 31 DAYS 11,345,750,362 PAST YEAR

~~~
citricsquid
I've heard of Drudge Report before, but never really understood it. Who / what
does it cater to and what is its function, a sort of one-man curated news
reddit?

~~~
sharkweek
I'd say his main demographic is your conservative / libertarian who has little
to no faith in government. Socially drudge tends to be moderate; fiscally,
very conservative. Sort of a "keep your government hands out of my pocket"
type attitude.

He heavily influences a lot of conservative politics, as his reach is massive.
Many people think he helped drum up Romney support with a specific narrative
across his site in the 2012 Republican primary (whether or not he was paid is
up to which conspiracy theorist you speak with).

A link on his site can result in millions of page views

~~~
ctdonath
During the Elian Gonzales affair, I sequenced some AP photos into an animation
(giving a video effect to a series of photos of a kidnapping) and posted them
on my website for a few friends to see. The link ended up on Drudge. AP called
to object, and the traffic load was so high I couldn't log on to the server to
remove the GIF. Had to call the ISP, told the receptionist "hi, I'm the reason
your servers are melting down", and she cheerfully transferred me to the
company president. He got a big chuckle out of it, the file was deleted,
traffic subsided, and I learned what it meant to get linked to by Drudge.

------
ceslami
Markus Frind, Plenty of Fish: [http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-
money-comes-rol...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-
rolling-in.html)

~~~
jemka
That came to my mind too, but it's no longer just Markus and hasn't been for
some time. They currently have 66 employees.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlentyofFish>

------
noblethrasher
Hacker News is (was?) mostly run by one person and, about a year ago, was
getting over 2.4 million uniques per month and 26 million page views.

Source: <http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html>

------
seanlinehan
Twicsy is sort of NSFW for anybody who make check it out. Some naked breasts
just popped up on my screen in public. Not exactly an ideal outcome, though
not unexpected for a "trending" section on a Twitter picture search engine.

------
stbtrax
Imgur until somewhat recently was run by an individual.

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wallawe
How does Twicsy do revenue wise? I would love to hear the story behind it and
how you got to that many users.

~~~
dumbfounder
Revenue is abysmal. No decent networks will advertise on Twicsy due to the
adult content. Up until about 2 months ago I couldn't even cover server costs
with the ad money.

As for the story:

I launched it back in 2009 as a last ditch effort to save my company
(Searchles) and was featured on TechCrunch a few times that first week. But,
since then, the coverage has been almost nonexistent. I have relied on organic
growth, SEO, and old fashioned, bullheaded persistence since then. It has
grown about 5x each of the past 3 years.

I have been running it in my spare time since March of 2010, and I am not the
world's greatest web developer, so almost all improvements have been on the
back end just trying to scale the site.

If you are interested in the tech: I run MySQL on a 2TB SSD RAID 5 array, but
then I use data caching servers I developed myself to speed up serving the
site (some data in memory, most on SSD). The near real time search was also
developed by me. Only 4 total servers are used to run the site.

~~~
Irregardless
There must be a way around that. Imgur's advertising seems to be pretty
standard, but they have gigabytes of nude and/or violent photos uploaded on a
weekly basis.

Would it hurt your traffic too much to not have it displayed so prominently on
the front page?

~~~
dumbfounder
I would display a big picture of a nun on the homepage if it made advertisers
happy about the rest of the site. I have been talking to ad people for a while
now and I can't seem to get around it. But I will continue to try.

I tried some searches on imgur and nothing nasty comes up. On Twicsy it is
very easy to get nasty stuff to appear.

Looks like imgur uses Google Adsense, they have cut me off several times.

~~~
Irregardless
Yeah, imgur must have all the NSFW content hidden from their own search.
Anyone who knows how to use Reddit will know where to find the NSFW stuff
they've swept under the rug though, so I'm surprised that's enough for Adsense
to give it the OK -- Reddit users are probably 90%+ of imgur's audience.

Maybe you need to do the same thing: set up an "un-affiliated" website that
allows you find all the 18+ content on Twicsy, haha

~~~
dumbfounder
I have thought about it a lot, but the quantity makes it unmanageable. I have
over 1.6 billion pics indexed, about 5 million added each day.

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kayge
I think Matthew Inman from TheOatmeal.com does pretty well. According to Wiki
(not the best source, I know) : "As of 2010, the website got an average of 4.6
million unique visitors and more than 20 million page views a month."

~~~
dumbfounder
That is a good one, does anyone have recent stats for them?

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centdev
I run a site that generates 300m pvs on mobile web, 100m pvs on desktop with
2.7m uniques every month (I believe this is actually substantially higher but
not fully tracked in Google Analytics for some reason).

~~~
dumbfounder
What is the site? Are those pageview numbers monthly?

~~~
centdev
The numbers are monthly and its based on twitter

~~~
dumbfounder
I am curious about your site, if you want to share via email you can reach me
at chris at twicsy.youknowhat

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gprasanth
I block google analytics, and I think many others too do so(yay! for
ghostery).

You probably are getting a little(lot?) more visitors than what ga says.

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dangrossman
I run W3Counter which tracks over 100 million page views a month. Every load
involves both reading from and writing to a database, and about 50% of the
time, dynamic image generation... so no CDNs or response caching.

------
velodrome
I started a message board service for a few years back. The service had 35-40M
pv/mo, 10-12M unique/mo, and more than 1.2M users. Also, the site was in the
Alexa 1000 for a few months before it was sold.

I was the only engineer on the project. We had 5-10 volunteers to help support
our service (general help, technical support, etc). So, to say I ran the
service myself would be a lie.

~~~
dumbfounder
If you have built such a strong community that people are willing to help out
for free I think that is much more impressive than being able to claim you did
it all by yourself.

------
pbhjpbhj
Under what definition. Do they need to just run the content, does having
[significant] UGC count as being self-run (I'd warrant not [+ what is
significant]). Do they have to run it all down to the bare metal or is a
managed server environment allowed. What about regular colo'? Does the site
have to run it's own DNS.

No man['s website] is an island.

------
sayemm
Interesting post by Markus Frind on just that, "Digital 100, most valuable
boot strapped company" -
[http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/digital-100-mos...](http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/digital-100-most-
valuable-boot-strapped-company/)

~~~
jemka
The post seems to be the exact opposite of "just that".

e.g. the 3rd sentence...

>I also dont see any that had just a single founder.

~~~
sayemm
Right, most aren't, but his story shows how far a solo founder can go.

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entropy_
They just posted this notice:

 _Google Play is currently experiencing very high traffic. Nexus 4 is not sold
out and will still be available for purchase. Please try again shortly. Thank
you for your patience._

There is hope yet

~~~
indiecore
Important info but I think you have the wrong topic.

~~~
entropy_
Shit, I did. No clue how that happened...

------
joe_bleau
Drudge report?

------
Zaheer
I have a site that get 1.5 million monthly uniques according to GA as well.

------
ntulip
okcupid.com was for a long time.

~~~
citricsquid

        OkCupid’s founders (Chris Coyne, Christian Rudder, 
        Sam Yagan and Max Krohn)
    

From wikipedia, seems it was never just one person.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OkCupid>

------
dschiptsov
4chan

------
indiecore
My gut reaction was 4chan as well and I feel like that's probably true; well,
for the English speaking world anyway.

~~~
Weltschmerz
While Poole may be the only one (or one of the few) people getting checks from
4chan.org, he doesn't have full responsibility for the operation of the site.
The site is managed by many volunteer members; "janitors." I think there is
something to be said here about the power of an authentic internet community
whose participants are willing to work for no compensation, to further its
dictator's interests. And that discussion probably involves entertainment
value, as well as an apparent sense of equality.

~~~
stfu
The question is always to what degree others are contributing to a website so
it is still run by a "single" person. In most cases there might be a person
checking in on the servers on a regular basis that is paid through the hosting
fee, etc.

Plus there are not dictatorships on the internet. People vote with their feet
and are, especially on an anonymous site such as 4chan not locked in, like
they are with Facebook profile/networks.

If there were something describable as dictatorships on the internet, I would
argue that it is those sites that try to impose their own values and judgments
on their members, and not 4chan (and to a minor degree reddit), which (in most
parts) only rule is to avoid completely illegal themes.

~~~
Weltschmerz
I see your point, however, unlike a platform such as Reddit, the available
categories under which you may post content are decided upon or terminated by
Poole. There is an implicit democracy, where contributing content constitutes
endorsement of the platform, but I think you will find that many decisions
Poole has made on behalf of 4chan were unpopular. I'm not suggesting that
truly democratic internet communities even exist, but 4chan is much farther
from that ideal than Reddit. But what 4chan has is _privacy_.

~~~
indiecore
> I'm not suggesting that truly democratic internet communities even exist,
> but 4chan is much farther from that ideal than Reddit.

I disagree. 4chan is if anything _more_ democratic than most sites even if it
is a sort of semi-anarchic mob rule version of democracy.

The first thing I'd like to counter is the idea that the available categories
are determined by the 4chan admins and by moot in particular. It is true that
he's the one who makes new boards to talk about specific subjects but that
doesn't mean that if there isn't a board it doesn't get talked about,
generally it'll happen in whatever board has the most users interested in that
subject, and if it becomes a problem or starts taking over the board there
will be a general purpose board spun off for that subject in particular.
Examples of this (in the positive "lots of people are talking about this and
need a space) are /tg/ which spun off from warhammer wednesday on /b/ and
/lit/ and /toy/ were both spun off from recurring topics on /tg/. Less
positive examples include /soc/ and /adv/ which were supposed to clean up
/r9k/ and /mlp/ because pony threads were a _huge_ problem on /co/.

I think the problem here is that Reddit's (and HN's for that matter)
"democracy" function is explicitly part of the site whilst 4chan's is hidden
and based on the whims of the audience.

