I had a phone call this morning with our national GM, where I had to explain why HN is noted as consistently in our top 5 referring sites (which is to say I had to explain what HN actually is).<p>That's attributable to the fact that I'm active in this community, so I was surprised to see it accounting for so much traffic on a larger sample, but there's certainly evidence that even links that get no votes and no comments still drive traffic (though not as much as links that add value and create discussion).
the fact that they have HN as having 2.4 times more referrer traffic than reddit makes me question this.<p>Look at the numbers, HN is a top 3,000 site, reddit is a top 300 site.
This wasn't at all surprising to me. HN has a great community of tech enthusiasts who have a insatiable appetite for tech content. I'm sure the people who ask for critiques on their web apps get a nice traffic boost.
Useful data, thanks! I'm a little disappointed the pie charts don't include 'Other', which would have given a sense of how long the tail is.<p>Regarding the seeming discrepancy in data for Google's share, the reasons are probably: (i) more of Bing/Yahoo's traffic stays within their portals than Google's does, and (ii) Google is especially dominant among tech-savvy users, and the websites that were analyzed have proportionally more of such users (which would also explain why HN shows up).
Considering that Social Networking site data is skewed due to not accounting for apps, could it be possible that is happening in the Social Bookmark space as well? Do Reddit and Slashdot have iPhone/Android apps?