One of my blog posts was submitted to HN that had 194 points and 149 comments[1]. All dates are in UTC.
1 - Unique visitors per day - Including spiders
Hits h% Vis. v% Tx. Amount Data
------ ------ ----- ------ ----------- ----
14439 1.49% 1148 1.19% 106.42 MiB 21/Jan/2023
17043 1.75% 1754 1.81% 184.69 MiB 20/Jan/2023
33560 3.45% 3267 3.37% 491.32 MiB 19/Jan/2023
46568 4.79% 5816 6.01% 637.54 MiB 18/Jan/2023
323797 33.32% 28928 29.88% 4.06 GiB 17/Jan/2023 <- Resubmitted on HN and websites started copy-pasting the article from the big website with the same mistakes, never checking my post which had a note about these mistakes :)
24330 2.50% 3341 3.45% 360.48 MiB 16/Jan/2023 <- Put in a second-chance pool by a moderator and an article with a lot of mistakes published by some big website
17074 1.76% 3348 3.46% 243.44 MiB 15/Jan/2023 <- Published on HN
1041 0.11% 120 0.12% 3.70 MiB 14/Jan/2023
1666 0.17% 171 0.18% 8.40 MiB 13/Jan/2023 <- Post published
991 0.10% 123 0.13% 374.78 KiB 12/Jan/2023
2 - Requested Files (URLs)
Hits h% Vis. v% Tx. Amount Mtd Proto Data
----- ------ ----- ------ ----------- -------- -------- ----
57604 5.93% 31427 32.46% 260.97 MiB GET HTTP/2 /en/2023/01/13/msi-insecure-boot/
31179 3.21% 11263 11.63% 245.20 MiB GET HTTP/1.1 /en/2023/01/13/msi-insecure-boot/
11 - Referring Sites (depends on Referer header, not very accurate for reasons)
Hits h% Vis. v% Tx. Amount Data
------ ------ ----- ------ ---------- ----
446781 45.97% 29686 30.66% 5.95 GiB dawidpotocki.com
14834 1.53% 9485 9.80% 79.85 MiB news.ycombinator.com
(news sites with very low hundreds or even under, nobody checks sources)
HN has millions of page views per day (maybe @dang can give a more accurate and updated number), and things frequently gets reposted elsewhere. Happens many times that things on the frontpage gets brought down to its knees, this wouldn't be the first nor the last.
> There's no stats page but last I checked it was around 5M monthly unique users (depending on how you count them), perhaps 10M page views a day (including a guess at API traffic), and something like 1300 submissions (stories) and 13k comments a day.
Forgot to mention, but "I was on the HN frontpage for X hours and got X views" doesn't always translate to the same happening for everything. Some topics are more interesting to the people just browsing HN, than others. I'd expect an article titled "I spent $6 Million On Google Ads Last Year" to be significantly less interesting than "MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry" for example, where the latter would surely gather a magnitude of more visits than the earlier, even if they would spend the same amount of hours on the frontpage.
Some content is simply more interesting for a broader audience.
Hacker News has 3.4 million users per month and 350,000 users per day, with 4 million pageviews a day. There are just under 1 million registered accounts, with several hundred added each day. Users post around 1,000 articles and 6,000 comments to the site per day. https://blog.samaltman.com/2017-yc-annual-letter
Not the OP but they were referring to the whole site. So definitely not millions, but the number is probably higher than you think.
From the blog you linked, the number of interest is 18k. 12k are only those with HN referrer headers. In reality, many setup strips that header so you can't track it exactly right. The author did mention they averaged 50 views before.
A big part of it are reposts. From my own submissions, posting to HN resulted in tons of different origins. Public ones like reddit, twitter and private ones like newsletters, dashboard & chat messages. You'll also be surprised by the wide variety of clients people use to access HN.
They also used Google analytics to track the numbers. Most people in HN block it either through the browser or an extension [0]. In reality it's probably double the traffic.
Don't forget to account for scraping & crawling bots. That's another big source of traffic that the author didn't track.
More than tens I'd say. I suspect for each person that interacts, there are dozens that don't. If I have to bet, I'd put the ratio at 1:100. So 100 lukers for every 1 active user.
