Does it matter whether HN traffic is going up or down? As far as I can tell, the point of HN isn't to drive pageviews or sell ads, it's to act as a public discussion board for the extended YC family of people with like-minded interests, and maybe a bit of a feeder system / promotion for the fund. If anything, fewer drive-bys mean higher-quality posts and comments, all the better for the regular participants.
S/N ratio is rarely improved by more traffic, after all.
So three different companies all claiming to have good data with three completely different shapes for the traffic in 2011. It shows just how unreliable the data is. I remember the reddit folks saying just how bad the sites like the above were compared to the actual traffic they were getting (can't be bothered to find the link).
I didnt say anything about specific numbers; I just stated fact that the numbers are falling. I agree with you that each monitoring company comes up with totally different numbers. on the top of that, companies do revamp their websites - use more or less ajax, change approach to pinging back theirs servers for updated data, etc, and numbers can go sky-high or plummet and still it won't be a reliable read. but AFAIK this "problem" does not affect rather stable design of HN.
> Did you see how they collect their data? ("Representative consumers in the US")
Again, if I dont look into numbers, but only simple chart, I read it that: representative consumers in US that use hackerNews website declined. thats it.
Now, someone else pointed: does it even matter? It depends who we ask.
Except Google says they are climbing and Alexa says they are about the same, and as Raldi pointed in his link for stats of Reddit (a somewhat similar site) the numbers these services report are essentially fiction.
> representative consumers in US that use hackerNews website declined
According to Quantcast they are climbing (almost 50% increase).
The only people who know the actual traffic figures are the admins. Why not ask them for the real numbers instead of considering one cherry picked report as a fact?
Comments
but HN statistics dont look promising either:
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/news.ycombinator.com/
Does it matter whether HN traffic is going up or down? As far as I can tell, the point of HN isn't to drive pageviews or sell ads, it's to act as a public discussion board for the extended YC family of people with like-minded interests, and maybe a bit of a feeder system / promotion for the fund. If anything, fewer drive-bys mean higher-quality posts and comments, all the better for the regular participants.
S/N ratio is rarely improved by more traffic, after all.
Did you see how they collect their data? ("Representative consumers in the US")
http://www.compete.com/us/about/our-data/
Google shows the graph going up over time (and is international):
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=news.ycombinator.com
Alexa has a different shape (bump up in 1Q2011 and then slow decline):
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com
So three different companies all claiming to have good data with three completely different shapes for the traffic in 2011. It shows just how unreliable the data is. I remember the reddit folks saying just how bad the sites like the above were compared to the actual traffic they were getting (can't be bothered to find the link).
http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-...
I didnt say anything about specific numbers; I just stated fact that the numbers are falling. I agree with you that each monitoring company comes up with totally different numbers. on the top of that, companies do revamp their websites - use more or less ajax, change approach to pinging back theirs servers for updated data, etc, and numbers can go sky-high or plummet and still it won't be a reliable read. but AFAIK this "problem" does not affect rather stable design of HN.
> Did you see how they collect their data? ("Representative consumers in the US")
Again, if I dont look into numbers, but only simple chart, I read it that: representative consumers in US that use hackerNews website declined. thats it.
Now, someone else pointed: does it even matter? It depends who we ask.
> I just stated fact that the numbers are falling
Except Google says they are climbing and Alexa says they are about the same, and as Raldi pointed in his link for stats of Reddit (a somewhat similar site) the numbers these services report are essentially fiction.
> representative consumers in US that use hackerNews website declined
According to Quantcast they are climbing (almost 50% increase).
The only people who know the actual traffic figures are the admins. Why not ask them for the real numbers instead of considering one cherry picked report as a fact?
And HN just published their stats showing that your "fact" is complete BS.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3669947