On Monday, I spontaneously decided to write a post about my high school iPod venture. I hadn’t posted in over a month and I thought it would be a nice break from the load of Econ papers that I had to write for the week. I had no real expectations that many people would end up reading the post but I submitted it to Hacker News for the hell of it. It was my first Hacker News submission and I had figured that getting to the top of HN required a massive network of friends to simultaneously upvote the post. Much to my surprise, the post received 206 total upvotes without any real effort, maintaining a pretty high position in the rankings for a fair amount of time.

I know it’s probably a bit cliché to post a breakdown of the traffic garnered from an HN post but I’m doing it anyway. The post went live at 4:41 PM EST on Monday (4/30) and by 6:00 PM, it had already received 2,042 unique visitors. By 7:00 PM, 5,459 visitors. Seven hours later at midnight, 14,858 visitors.

The next morning, I received an e-mail from Gizmodo asking for my permission to syndicate the post. Despite receiving over 135,000 visits on the Gizmodo-syndicated post, very few people ended up on my blog from the link to my post in the footer. I thought the breakdown was interesting so I’m going to share it with you. Let’s start with the HN stats for Monday.

Hacker News – 4.30.2012

How many unique visitors ended up seeing the post on Monday? 

14,858

How did people get to the post?

 

 

 

 

 

 

What countries are these people from?

Most popular cities? 
San Francisco: 5.20%
New York: 4.66%
London: 1.83%
Seattle: 1.69%
Chicago: 1.68%

What about the rest of the week?

Despite falling in the rankings, the rest of the week yielded 4,064 more visits from HN, totaling 17,598 HN visits from Monday to Friday.

Gizmodo – 5.01.2012

How many unique visitors came from Gizmodo to my blog on Tuesday?

2,067

How did people get to the post?

What countries are these people from?

Most popular cities?
London: 4.25%
New York: 3.66%
San Francisco: 1.69%
Chicago: 1.54%
Toronto: 1.09%

What about the rest of the week?
The bulk of the Gizmodo traffic came on Tuesday when the post was syndicated. Only 332 more visitors came to my blog through Gizmodo from Wednesday to Friday. However, as of Friday, 137,847 visitors read my post on Gizomdo.

Conclusion

Throughout the week, 25,574 unique visitors stumbled upon my post on my blog. Most of these visitors came from Hacker News, despite the ~138,000 visitors that read the post through Gizmodo. Aside from the raw statistics, here is what this post yielded:

Twitter Followers:

Facebook Subscribers:

Radio Interviews:
1
Pete the Planner, an Indianapolis radio show, interviewed me yesterday (Friday) about the post. The interview will go live tomorrow (Sunday) at 10AM EST.

Job Interviews:
1
Undisclosed SF-based startup.

 Free Stuff:
1
A pair  of headphones in an attempt to get me to review them on my blog.
Overall , it was an interesting learning experience and I hope to continue writing. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me via e-mail / twitter/ fb. Happy Cinco de Mayo.