Ask HN: How much traffic does HN get?

12 points·matt_daemon··9 comments

General question around how many unique visitors HN gets on average per day?

Or if others have examples of their articles being on the front page and how many hits they received.

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ahrefs.com estimates 1.5M monthly visitors: https://ahrefs.com/traffic-checker

I've had a few articles go to the front page, near the top, and my analytics shows 20k-30k visitors.

Here's a more detailed post from someone else: https://www.swyx.io/lspace-2022

Nice, thanks.

I've had recently an article on the front page for some time, 707 karma, 430 comments, 10k visits to my website.

This article from 2019 has stats.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...

See this comment from @dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140

Great find!

But a depressing comment from dang is in that thread:

> That's my theory too—there's a cap on interesting content.

I actually have a different hypothesis. There's no cap on interesting stories, but rather there's a cap on how long a submission can be noticed. The more submissions there are being posted, the faster existing submissions drop off the first couple new post pages, where people might see them. If a post can't stay long enough to be noticed, people might just elect to hold off posting until the new post space becomes less crowded.

Attention contention.

I am not sure about this, because if so, then you'd see submissions at a constant rate.

But they tend to cluster around business hours Pacific: https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective

I've posted on Sunday and the new page is super slow then.

It might be a function of the number of submissions + the number of people available to upvote them (both increase during the work week and decrease on the weekend).

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