It really depends on the product and the article content. When Lollipuff (women's fashion) was at the top of HN for "Our YC Application", we had very few real signups -- but lots of pageviews and time on site.
Having read the Groove blog post... I still have no clue what it is they do. Just putting a simple one-liner in the blog post may have improved conversions significantly.
EDIT: If the author of the article is listening... What Groove does is at least as important as your bio at the end of the article. Put something in the post. Or in the sidebar. Or somewhere!
Love this feedback :) Thanks so much for sharing. We try hard not to promote the product on our blog, having said that I think a simple 1 liner in the bio about the app would do well.
For me, and I've seen this feedback here in HN as well, it's annoying when I click on your logo and it takes me to the blog home rather than the product home - even when I'm already on the blog home.
That said - this blog entry is amazing! I'll check out the others in this series as well. THANK YOU for sharing all this!
There are a lot of well-intentioned opinions here but it'll be interesting to see if there's any correlation with your real-world data and conversions.
I -for one- am really interested in following your growth but I'm not in the market for a support service (yet). I'm not your customer, why would you care what I think about your UX and whether or not you should have a video lander?
My business, LiberWriter.com was at the top of HN at one point in time. New signups? 0. Our target market is completely different from the HN crowd, almost all of whom can do what we do for themselves.
