So, last week’s SAT Challenge rollout got picked up by Slashdot, which led to a great big spike in traffic. How big? Well, here’s a graph:
“Big deal,” you say, “It’s not that big a spike.”
Thing is, that’s a semi-log plot. The top of the spike represents almost a factor of twenty more visits than the average for the two weeks before we got slashdotted– 26,103 versus 1,380. That’s why the log plot is the appropriate graph– on a linear scale, you can’t even see the weekly variation in traffic. Look below the fold if you don’t believe me:
See what I mean?
As it stands, even if I don’t get another visit for the rest of the month (say, if I keep talking about Lee Smolin…), this will be the record for the year (53,558 as of 9:16 pm on the 10th). That’s pretty darn impressive.
Of course, two days after the peak, traffic was pretty much back to normal. The average for the past week is maybe 100-200 visits higher than the pre-slashdot average, and I posted a bunch of stuff this weekend.
Easy come, easy go. At least it came as a result of a project that Dave and I put some effort into, and not some oddball one-off post about something stupid that I did.
That was a lot of fun, though (and turned up a bunch of people around campus who read Slashdot…). Now I need to figure out how to make it happen again…
So does this mean you’re too proud to, say, glue sausage to Emmy?
Jeez. And here I’d be glad to have one of your BAD days.
What’s most striking to me is that the window is so short. I bet there are many more people who would be interested in that post, but they weren’t reading slashdot at the time, and so perhaps they’ll never see it. I wonder how much ordinary but fresh stuff I am reading compared to old but good stuff.
The even more dramatic “short attention span” phenomenon comes from the Kottke link. The post contained three links to Challenge-related sites. The first, to the Challenge site itself generated 400 visits. The second, to Dave’s anouncement of the site on Cognitive Daily, generated 272 visits. The third, to one of my posts, generated only 163.
Slashdot didn’t follow the same pattern. Weirdly, the bulk of the traffic seems to have gone to the fifth link in the slashdot post, which was to my SAT Challenge category (8,760 visits on the first day).