It'd be interesting if there were a way to measure proportion of visitors from different sources who engaged, by some definition of engagement. Ideally I want to know "read the article", but that's hard to measure. Number of new feed subscriptions might be a decent proxy for "read and really liked the article", though.<p>One reason I want to know that is that for my own sites, I've generally found a large proportion of link-blog traffic to be very shallow, to the point where maybe one in 100 hits is a "real" hit. This is particularly the case at link-blogs without any summary blurbs. Slashdotters who don't want to read the article, for example, often just read the blurb and don't bother to click through, so a bigger proportion of those who do click through are at least somewhat interested in reading. A much larger percentage of people on sites like Reddit click through, but I don't think a much larger percentage actually read the articles; many are just clicking through to figure out what the article's about, since there's no blurb to explain it. And some don't even do that much, since a common Reddit use pattern is "middle-click on every article to open in new tab, then work through the tabs", often culminating in just closing the remaining still-unread tabs when you're done reddit-surfing, which results in a ton of spurious hits that involved no human eyeballs.<p>Anecdotally, the proportion of shallow-hits/not-even-real-hits goes up somewhat proportionally to traffic. Front-page of reddit delivers maybe 100x as much traffic as front-page of a more niche sub-reddit, but <i>much</i> less than 100x real readership.
I've been trying to see if I can fairly-accurately match the number of visitors I had with some type of mathematical expression. As I pointed out in the article, the decay looks exponential.<p>I've gotten closer with f(x) = 2658e^(-0.94)+30, but as x approaches infinity (or even 5) it starts to full apart. Any one good with the maths who wants to take a look?<p>I decided with this one to throw out the first datapoint (the day my site launched) since it was likely still growing during this period of (overall) decay. How significant is this?<p>The actual numbers: [2688, 1065, 452, 206, 138, 105]
My function's numbers: [2688, 1068, 436, 188, 91, 54]<p>For easy playing: <a href="http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=table[+2658e^%28-0.94x%29+%2B+30%2C+{x%2C0%2C5}+" rel="nofollow">http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=table[+2658e^%28-0.94x%...</a>]
The numbers from when I've been on HN is similar to yours. Traffic itself isn't super important to me, though; mostly I'm just happy knowing the people coming in from Hacker News might end up following me on Twitter, following me on GitHub, or just generally retweet and reblog my stuff. It's a great crew.<p>Hacker News may not generate as many clicks as Digg would, but visitors from here are way more interesting to me.
Good to see that HN Daily shows up in the referers, even if it is just 1% of the direct HN numbers -- I really had no idea how many people would end up using it, but it seems that there's a few people at least.
If you're post is only on the new section and never makes the front page it will still get a bit of traffic.<p><a href="http://abiekatz.com/2010/08/20/introducing-a-new-theory-the-recommendularity/" rel="nofollow">http://abiekatz.com/2010/08/20/introducing-a-new-theory-the-...</a><p>It got 5 karma points and 29 page views from Hacker News.<p>So making the front page is very important for getting traffic from HN. I am sure this is the case for any social news site.