What the Frontpage of Reddit Does To A New Blog In 24 Hours
- Posted by glen on August 9th, 2006
I decided to add my post on not checking your email first or last thing to Reddit almost exactly 24 hours ago. Since then, I’ve had the honor of being on the Reddit frontpage for all but one of those blissful hours, and has just recently been knocked from the frontpage.
I have recieved huge amounts of traffic in a short period of time, as well as many subscribers to my feed. This could be very interesting to a lot of people because my blog is so new. That post was only my 4th on this blog, and I had almost no traffic whatsoever. All of the visits I’ve recieved in the past 24 hours are virtually all from Reddit. So consider this a case study on how much traffic you can recieve if your blog is on the frontpage of Reddit for 24 hours.Reddit Stats
The highest I ever saw the post ever get to was 7th. It hung out in the top 10 for at least 7-8 hours. (I’m not sure on some of this because I had to get some sleep). The article has gotten 171 points, and has had 21 comments. I had a puny link karma of 2 before submitting this piece, and now that the smoke is clearing, it’s up at 46. Although I’m not entirely clear on what Karma does, I think it should help with posting new articles down the road.
Raw Traffic
I use Performancing Metrics to handle my blog analytics. It’s really robust and easy to set up, not to mention it’s free. I was able to break down my traffic statistics by the hour. To this point I’ve recieved at least 7,980 total visits from Reddit. The highest point of the day was around 3pm (US Central Time), with almost 900 visits within the hour. This was right around the time my post had climbed up into the top 10.
Geography
The geographics of the users sent to me are pretty interesting too. 64% of the users were from the US, 8% from Canada, 7% from the UK, 3% from the Down Under and 2% from Germany. And I have no clue where 17% of the visitors are from.
Browsers
I am all about Firefox, so it was refreshing to see that 58% used it at Reddit. 16% used IE, 6% Safari and 19% used something else.
Interestingly enough, hardly anyone used a resolution under 1024×768.
Subscription Stats
Before Reddit I had no users signed up for LifeDev’s feed. I woke up this morning, and I kid you not, had 217 people subscribed to it. And that was just in about an 13 hour time period. I think I’ll put one of those little ego buttons on my site that shows how many people are subscribed. Look out TechCrunch!
As far as my email subscription goes, only 2 people signed up for my newsletter. But who cares? I’m still stoked about the feed subscription numbers ;)
Bookmarks, Technorati, etc.
I now have 18 people who favorited the story at Del.icio.us, and 7 more who favorited LifeDev.net. Technorati tells me that I’ve gotten 8 links from around the net, and it has sent my traffic rank down to 478,084. One of those links come from the infamous Jeremy Zawodny and his link blog.
Just for grins, at about 4pm (US Central time), I registered my blog at BlogTopSites.com, under the personal category. Of about 8,000 blogs, mine shot up to 4th this morning.
Adsense and Amazon
Because I can’t give exact amounts of earnings due to Adsense’s TOS, all I can tell you that I made well under $5. Interestingly enough, I sent 14 clicks out to the book I quoted at Amazon, and 2 people bought it. That’s some pretty good CTR.
Conclusions
Well, it’s pretty obvious that the traffic from Reddit has done wonders for my readership, especially the feed readership. Apparently Reddit users aren’t interested in ads, but will click and buy a recommended book. Because the Reddit crowd is techy and informed, they probably have a little banner blindness. That’s ok. Feed readership is most important to any blog that’s just starting. And mine certainly skyrocketed from a single front page posting at Reddit.
August 9th, 2006 at 1:47 pm
[...] read more | digg story [...]
August 9th, 2006 at 2:33 pm
[...] Original post by LifeDev. To read the full article visit: LifeDev [...]
August 9th, 2006 at 3:49 pm
Ironic isn’t it that the post in which you describe your fantastic experience with Reddit doesn’t have one of those nifty Reddit-it buttons? (although you do have a Digg-it button)
I just hooked up Reddit, Digg and Delicious to my website. Let’s see how well it works for me.
August 9th, 2006 at 4:29 pm
Good suggestion Pranav ;)
August 9th, 2006 at 5:31 pm
Great writeup. I’m glad reddit could send some traffic your way. I should mention that we”ve got a few varieties of reddit buttons and that karma doesn’t actually affect the success of future submissions, nor does it affect the weight of a redditor’s vote.
Nevertheless, congrats!
August 9th, 2006 at 5:52 pm
Thanks Alexis!
August 9th, 2006 at 7:13 pm
Reddit Results in RSS Readers…
Reddit is a collaboratively filtered news site that’s similar to digg but does not nearly get the same kind of press. However, if you’re lucky to have someone upload a link to your site and it takes off - watch…
August 9th, 2006 at 8:34 pm
Congratulations! I had a similar experience with one of my new blogs recently. Now at 1600-2000 (it varies daily!) subs in FeedBurner within two months of launch! Keep up the good work.
On your AdSense point, I’d argue that your positioning isn’t as great as it could be, and you really need to try out different configurations and see how they return (eCPM-wise) and then use the best one. I did this over the course of a few months and it has paid mega dividends (with an established blog, though, not the new one).
August 9th, 2006 at 9:10 pm
Pretty impressive… I wonder what your stats would be for the same time period on Digg?…
August 9th, 2006 at 9:52 pm
I think the most interesting part is the subscribers to your feed — that’s a LOT of sign ups! The biggest upside to the one day spurt seems to be getting some constant readers to your site, rather than just the momentary blip of traffic.
August 9th, 2006 at 9:57 pm
You_lucky(talented)_bastard.
:)
August 9th, 2006 at 11:48 pm
[...] What the Frontpage of Reddit Does To A New Blog In 24 Hours at LifeDev This is an interesting read and the outcome is similar to what Marios experienced with digg.com (http://www.mariosalexandrou.com/blog/index.asp?post=218). What I find really interesting in both cases is that they didn’t see any Google AdSense clicks. Th (tags: digg google adsense rss reddit) [...]
August 10th, 2006 at 5:11 am
great article, I just published a similar article on affects of Digg traffic! Check it out,
http://shuzak.com/Personal/Digg-Analytics.php
August 10th, 2006 at 7:03 am
Congratulations, and a very nice theme design.
One reason why you didn’t get too much revenue out of AdSense could be that your site isnt optimised for AdSense (the top ad block is WAY too small, and the rectangle at the bottom is no good for CTR). It’s true that the Digg/Reddit crowd doesn’t really click on ads, but even then, your adsense could use some tweaking…
August 10th, 2006 at 7:10 am
Also, a lot of your feed subscribers are basically using firefox live bookmarks…so what you’ve gained is a lot of “let’s see” subscribers, not “we like this” subscribers.
Of course, you can dispute / confirm that by watching your feed stats in the next week or so…
August 10th, 2006 at 7:37 am
Interesting observations.
Will you put up another post, now that you have also made it to the top on Performancing - (permalink).
Good post, good observations. :)
Regards,
Shri.
PS: Err, TechCrunch has 75000 users. Don’t worry, you are getting there :)
August 10th, 2006 at 9:01 am
Congrats on your success. But I must caution you a bit concerning your Feedburner Statistics. You’ll probably experience a bit of “die-back” in the numbers due to the way Feedburner counts things.
August 10th, 2006 at 9:13 am
well, keep some real content up, and you could quit your day job.
August 10th, 2006 at 10:37 am
Congratulations! Great Job.
I too started a little blog about 2 months ago, and got “I like’d it” at Stumble Upon which is actually just serving up random cool pages to users. I got more than 4,000 visitors in 48 hours. Not nearly as good quality traffic as Reddit, but it did introduce people to my site, if only for 5 seconds. Some stayed, and actually 50 did sign up for feeds. Almost nothing in terms of adsense.
Actually, the depressing part comes as the spike in traffic goes and you get back to earning visitors one at a time! :-)
August 10th, 2006 at 10:43 am
Ooops. My blog is so new, I can’t even get the address correct. It is at http://www.xeep.net not http://www.xeep.com.
August 10th, 2006 at 11:17 am
I before E except after C.
August 10th, 2006 at 2:51 pm
This is interesting. I didn’t know Reddit community was so vast. Nice site!
August 11th, 2006 at 6:49 am
[...] This is exactly what happened to the LifeDev blog. What’s interesting is that the boost he saw from Reddit wasn’t a one-time deal. It gave him an increase in RSS feed readers. Oh and by the way, his blog post about his experience earned him a return trip to the Reddit home page. [...]
August 11th, 2006 at 2:31 pm
[...] Also, check out what a good showing on Reddit did for a new blog. And, in case you didn’t know, McDonald’s employees are not not doing anything to your food. [...]
August 11th, 2006 at 10:55 pm
The challenge is always to maintain traffic to a site. You may get an initial spike in traffic for some reason or other, but if there is no compelling reason for people to re-visit your site, the traffic will just come and go…
August 13th, 2006 at 10:45 pm
[...] Well, over at LifeDev, they have some stats on how the frontpage of Reddit impacts a blog: Well, it’s pretty obvious that the traffic from Reddit has done wonders for my readership, especially the feed readership. Apparently Reddit users aren’t interested in ads, but will click and buy a recommended book. Because the Reddit crowd is techy and informed, they probably have a little banner blindness. That’s ok. Feed readership is most important to any blog that’s just starting. And mine certainly skyrocketed from a single front page posting at Reddit. [...]
August 14th, 2006 at 6:33 am
Possibly not so much a case of blind to the ads as the ads just don’t show up. 58% used Firefox. I would bet that a large portion of those are using the AdBlock and/or NoScript extensions. Either will kill your ads (I just tested both).
August 15th, 2006 at 7:53 am
[...] Or maybe one popular post is a big enough gateway for you to pick up regular readers and get the whole shebang on the road.. [...]
August 15th, 2006 at 10:24 am
Thanks for the kind words guys. Here’s a little update:
Ahmed was right in the fact that because most of my feed signups were from livebookmarks in Firefox, most of them went away. My readership dropped consistently until I was in the 90’s, and then rose today back into the 430. I think the big reason was 1) people don’t read as much over the web and 2) LifeDev was featured on Problogger.net. Pretty cool huh?
Hopefully I can keep the content up to snuff to keep my current readership :)
September 1st, 2006 at 2:10 am
That’s very interesting analysis, as I always wondered how my traffic would look like if I got on reddit’s or digg’s front page (which I’m far from succeeding at the moment).
Regarding the fact that your AdSense ads did not bring in too much, I had an experiment with my site, which confirmed me the same thing: social bookmarking sites active readers are not interested in ads. If you want to see my post, here it is: http://www.alltipsandtricks.com/blog/2006/08/31/a-personal-experiment-on-internet-traffic-sources/
October 17th, 2006 at 9:49 am
[...] Personally, I don’t write about too many newsy-ish stories, unless I find them really interesting and I know I can fuse my own voice and opinions to it. It may be a harder thing to do than just copying and pasting, but in the long run I know it will pay off. Shoot, it even pays off in the short-run too. These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
November 25th, 2006 at 7:31 am
Interesting comments. I learned a lot here.
Experienced similar traffic a few times, but it really depends on content, time of day and topic.
Cheers,
Chris
http://www.nomad4ever.com
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