Traffic Analysis of a Reddit Top Post
Reddit is a much bigger site than VideoSift - in the top 300 sites in the US, traffic-wise.
Yesterday we had our first #1 ranked Reddit post. That means we had a post that hung around at the top of the Reddit front page for a few hours. We get a lot of our posts sent to sites like Reddit or Digg, but they are often down voted, because they are not linked to the "source" - this being YouTube or other hosts. This reaction always surprises me because a site like Reddit seems to share lot of the anarchic, anti-corporate attitudes that we have here on the Sift.
I thought you might like to see some of the stats from the day. I love web stats . Some think it's like watching paint dry - but I feel like I'm plugged into something neat when I watch them. I should mention that VideoSift hit the number 1 position pretty late in the day, so this doesn't represent the result for any #1 position on Reddit necessarily.
This first graph is a chart from the excellent Chartbeat. (BTW I'm still hoping that I can open our Chartbeat page up to share with everyone - they know we want it)
On the chart above, you can see that our traffic peaked with 918 concurrent visitors at 8:30 PM (US PST) on the 26th. Chartbeat uses a browser based "heartbeat" that sends a little packet from the visitor's browser every 10 seconds. This means that at the peak there were 918 people all on VideoSift within that 10 second span. On a normal day, this number would hover around 500 during peak hours.
This next Google Analytics chart below shows the total number of visitors to VideoSift for April 27th. A typical Monday would yield around 40k visitors, so at 90k+ this is more than double our average tally. Because the Reddit onslaught bridged midnight, the 26th was a big day too - with 68k+ visitors. Currently, the total pageviews for April 27th show 149k+, but expect that to grow by about 20k, as Google Analytics does some kind of adjustment on pageviews, 8 hours after a day finishes. (update: pageviews for the 27th now total 157,242)
Next is an Analytics graph showing the number of visits on the 27th broken down by hour. (all times are US PST).
Finally, the below numbers indicate the total number of visitors just from Reddit for the 26th to the 27th of April combined. So, the answer to the question- how many visitors does a Reddit #1 ranking deliver? - in our case - is 57,717.
This is probably a low-ball figure. Sometimes the referral address doesn't come through- and there are also Reddit aggregators (last one NSFW) that send significant traffic as well. Taking that into account, the total number of Reddit related visits is probably closer to 80k. Note also the bounce rate of Reddit visitors of 89.12%. This means that only 11% people coming from Reddit stuck around to view something else. This is why some people say that Reddit or Digg visits are "low quality" traffic. It's not a sleight on the member base of these sites but refers to the fact that they tend to look at whatever they came for and then piss off.
Yesterday we had our first #1 ranked Reddit post. That means we had a post that hung around at the top of the Reddit front page for a few hours. We get a lot of our posts sent to sites like Reddit or Digg, but they are often down voted, because they are not linked to the "source" - this being YouTube or other hosts. This reaction always surprises me because a site like Reddit seems to share lot of the anarchic, anti-corporate attitudes that we have here on the Sift.
I thought you might like to see some of the stats from the day. I love web stats . Some think it's like watching paint dry - but I feel like I'm plugged into something neat when I watch them. I should mention that VideoSift hit the number 1 position pretty late in the day, so this doesn't represent the result for any #1 position on Reddit necessarily.
This first graph is a chart from the excellent Chartbeat. (BTW I'm still hoping that I can open our Chartbeat page up to share with everyone - they know we want it)
On the chart above, you can see that our traffic peaked with 918 concurrent visitors at 8:30 PM (US PST) on the 26th. Chartbeat uses a browser based "heartbeat" that sends a little packet from the visitor's browser every 10 seconds. This means that at the peak there were 918 people all on VideoSift within that 10 second span. On a normal day, this number would hover around 500 during peak hours.
This next Google Analytics chart below shows the total number of visitors to VideoSift for April 27th. A typical Monday would yield around 40k visitors, so at 90k+ this is more than double our average tally. Because the Reddit onslaught bridged midnight, the 26th was a big day too - with 68k+ visitors. Currently, the total pageviews for April 27th show 149k+, but expect that to grow by about 20k, as Google Analytics does some kind of adjustment on pageviews, 8 hours after a day finishes. (update: pageviews for the 27th now total 157,242)
Next is an Analytics graph showing the number of visits on the 27th broken down by hour. (all times are US PST).
Finally, the below numbers indicate the total number of visitors just from Reddit for the 26th to the 27th of April combined. So, the answer to the question- how many visitors does a Reddit #1 ranking deliver? - in our case - is 57,717.
This is probably a low-ball figure. Sometimes the referral address doesn't come through- and there are also Reddit aggregators (last one NSFW) that send significant traffic as well. Taking that into account, the total number of Reddit related visits is probably closer to 80k. Note also the bounce rate of Reddit visitors of 89.12%. This means that only 11% people coming from Reddit stuck around to view something else. This is why some people say that Reddit or Digg visits are "low quality" traffic. It's not a sleight on the member base of these sites but refers to the fact that they tend to look at whatever they came for and then piss off.
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