NIC HARALAMBOUS

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What the front page of Hacker News does to traffic

Yesterday, quite incredibly and without my knowledge for most of it, this blog hit the front page of Hacker News. The blog post, Don't Read TechCrunch, eventually made it to the top spot on the website and received over 90 comments.I wasn't sure what that meant but figured it out pretty quickly. I've been reading the site for a while and following their twitter account too but really had no concept of the reach. Until yesterday.I haven't seen this much traffic in a day in almost 4 years and that wasn't even on this blog.At the peak of the traffic there were 600 concurrent users on the site and specifically on that single blog post according to Google Analytics RealTime.Below is the state of affairs as at 11:18PM.26 000 unique visitors to the blog. That's probably more than I'll do for the entire year in 2013.I am definitely not writing this blog to hit the front pages of these sites but it is quite a good feeling when it does happen. I'm writing this blog as an outlet for my experiences and opinions as a entrepreneur at the tip of Africa.This is what a comparative chart of December 2nd and 3rd looks like:Not only was there a marked increase in unique users and page impressions but surprisingly there were even 22 comments on the blog post here as well as the over 90 on Hacker News itself.In truth I doubt that many, if any, of the new readers will return but it's always good to get a little spike in traffic.At the time of writing this article, my blog post has slipped to 17 on the front page but the day was a good one. I have to thank @n1c for posting the article to the site.