Breakdown of @HackerNews Visitors

Ever wondered who else read HackerNews? You might have made friendships, found new business partners or got great amounts of traffic from HackerNews. I was interested in what the average HackerNews reader runs on their computer, where they are living and how engaged they are when a HackerNews reader clicks on a link. To satisfy my interest, I pulled the numbers for Slashdot and did some analysis… Here it goes:

Since August 1st, in the last 6 months, more than 115,000 people came to visit Slashdot from HackerNews. Several stories featured and discussed on Slashdot made the homepage of HackerNews, of which the top 3 were:
1. Rob ‘Cmdr Taco’ Malda resigns from Slashdot (13,828 pageviews) (HN link)
2. Canonical drops CouchDB from Ubuntu One (5,185 pageviews) (HN link)
3. Sopa creator in tv/film/music industry pocket (4,839 pageviews) (HN link)

With 115,000 visits, I believe I have a big enough sample to analyze the HN users to find some commonalities and to profile the tech set up of their computers. For the analysis I used the Google Analytics data from Slashdot. For simplicity sake, I created an Advanced segment, which will generate all reports in fast-mode. This means the reports are based on Sampled data in GA! Learn more about fast mode in GA at the Google Support pages.

First, let’s breakdown the traffic, these 115K visits, a little further.

115,812 Visits
63,956 Unique Visitors
155,569 Pageviews
1.34 page/visit
2.51 Ave time on site
75.22% bounce rate
41.49% New visits

Compared to the average numbers of the Slashdot visits in that same period, HackerNews visitors were spending half the amount of time on the site, there were twice the percentage of new visitors and all these people were just passing through, bouncing back with a much higher rate than the average Slashdotter. I guess we can say that Slashdot has a very loyal, sticky audience, on average!

Where are HN users from?

Off course it would be interesting to see where these 115K HackerNews readers are living. In Google Analytics the location report is a great tool to see where your website visitors are coming from.

Which countries do these HackerNews visitors coming from?

The majority of HN visits to Slashdot came from people located in the USA. There is a large gap between the US and the #2.

The top countries with the visits are:

United States 70,524 visits
Australia 10,099 visits
India 4,839 visits
United Kingdom 4,148 visits
Canada 3,457 visits
France 2,074 visits
Netherlands 2,074 visits
Germany 1,728 visits
Norway 1,037 visits
Argentina 691 visits

I would like to mention here, that the fast-access mode in GA is rounding up the total reported visits in some cases. This is causing a large number of countries to report same amount of visits. Number 10 to number 24 all report 691 visits in the last 6 months. As this number is so small, it’s insignificant to the overall analysis. So if you live in Brazil, Italy, Israel or Pakistan, consider yourself lucky to share the #10 spot with Argentina!

Which Cities do these HackerNews readers call home?

The outcome of which city was sending the most visits from HackerNews to /. in the last 6 months was surprising to me. Based on the US sending the most visits from HN to Slashdot; I would have expected a city in the US to have the top spot on this list. Some would say this pends how GA slices the data, where the Bay Area is a good contender for the first spot based on the high concentration of high tech. However, would you have thought the #1 spot would be a shared nomination between an Australian & US city: Brisbane and San Antonio?

City map for HackerNews visits to Slashdot

Not as I expected, but the #1 spot for cities HN came from is shared between two cities. One is Brisbane, the other is San Antonio.

Brisbane 9,679 visits
San Antonio 9,679 visits
San Francisco 8,988 visits
Redwood City 6,222 visits
Oakland 5,531 visits
Bangalore 4,148 visits
New York 2,419 visits
London 2,074 visits
Bellevue 2,074 visits
Paris 1,728 visits

Number 11 & 12 have the same number of visits as Paris. Both Los Angeles and Sydney were reporting 1,728 visits in the last months to Slashdot from HackerNews. If you would add up all the Bay Area cities, San Francisco; Redwood City and Oakland, the Bay Area would have been #1 with 20,741 visits!

What browser is the favorite for HN users?

It has become clear from the visitor numbers I’ve analyzed, HackerNews readers use Internet Explorer very limited. The browser of choice for the HN visitor is Chrome. It’s impressive how Chrome is seeing high growth in market share in the browser wars, especially in tech savvy communities. For Slashdot’s HackerNews visits, the browser shares were dominated by Chrome to an extend I didn’t expected.

Chrome 67,104 visits
Firefox 21,434 visits
Safari 21,088 visits
Internet Explorer 2,765 visits
Android Browser 1,728 visits
Mozilla Compatible Agent 345 visits
Opera 345 visits

You could say, based on these numbers, the role of Internet Explorer in the browser market is finished!

What Operating System is the choice for HN users?

The operating system of choice for the HackerNews visitor is not a landslide victory for Apple Mac OS, but there is a large gap before Windows appears on the #2. Linux takes a respectable third place, after which the mobile OS’ are coming in on #4,5 and 6.

Macintosh
Windows
Linux
iPad
iPhone
Android

It would be interesting to see how the mobile operating systems take a larger share over time.

Of the Window users 84% is on Windows 7, while only 2% of HackerNews visitors rocking it on Windows Vista. Thirteen percent is still on Windows XP. Just 1% of Windows users are on Server 2003.

Screen resolution of the HN user?

And last, I wanted to see what kind of large screens HackerNews readers are using. The larger the screen resolution might indicate a very large screen!

1440×900 20,051
1280×800 14,865
1366×768 14,174
1920×1080 13,828
1920×1200 13,136
1280×1024 8,297
1680×1050 7,951
1024×600 4,494
768×1024 4,494
1024×768 3,457

Engagement of the HackerNews visitors

As the image at the top shows, the Average HackerNews visitor to Slashdot was not very engaged. With a bounce rate of ~75%, and 1.4 pages per visit and an average of 2.4 minutes on the site. These engagement numbers are considerable lower than the average Slashdot visitor.

Conclusion

On my Chrome browser, I have HackerNews set as the homepage. Every time I start my browser I can read instantly what is happening in the technology industry. HackerNews can bring any website a large amount of traffic, but you should always pay attention to what kind of traffic you need to be successful. If you are running a media company, and get paid based on CPM’s, HackerNews can be a great source of traffic.

Let me know if you would like to see these kind of analysis more often on different referrals.

Data: The data showcased in this post has been derived from the Slashdot Google Analytics for the period of August 1st – December 20th.

Disclaimer: The data presented in this analysis has been derived from Google Analytics on Slashdot. It represents a small subset of the total. The comments included herein are my own and don’t necessarily represent Geeknet’s opinions