A meta-analysis of the “Slashdot effect”
I have written an article on the phenomenon known as the Slashdot effect, having survived it twice in the month of July alone. I’ve analyzed traffic patterns and referrals, and I’ve got graphs and numbers: all the things a good computer dork enjoys in his spare time. An excerpt for your reading enjoyment:
The effects of the slashdot effect started very slowly until the site that recieved the full force of it picked me up as a primary mirror, and then traffic exploded. I was quite astounded since I was one layer of abstraction away, and it still blew the numbers away that I put up when I first mirrored the Episode III trailers. I’ll give you some numbers now, since geeks love numbers. The Star Destroyer story was posted on July 4:
Figures are bandwidth usage/page impressions:
Come on inside and check it out!
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[...] Writing full length articles on the spur of the moment, like I did the other night. [...]
Pingback by rianjs.net » Yeah… I could do that. — July 18, 2005 @ 12:04 am
Great writeup – enjoyed reading through it and especially got a chuckle out of the ISP tech doing the 10-100 Mbit upgrade real fast after he saw the story! ;-)
In case you are interested in another set of Slashdot Affect Data, my experience is quite similar to yours – see http://www.komar.org/faq/slashdot-effect/
Comment by alek — July 22, 2005 @ 12:33 am
[...] Update 4: For you slashdot types, I’ve written up an analysis of the slashdot effect. You can read it here. [...]
Pingback by rianjs.net » The BBC makes Beethoven’s symphonies available — July 22, 2005 @ 9:26 am
[...] I remember reading a similar email years ago, and for some reason, I always wondered idly if it were true. Not having thought about it much, I sort of forgot about it. But with all the insanity in the US surrounding the rising gas prices, it has resurfaced, more popular than ever. Officially, today was to be the day that no one bought gas. I’m sure that this didn’t happen for myriad reasons, the main one being that despite the size and saturation of Internet access in American households, the Internet is still fairly new, and newspapers and television still reach a wider audience. Even massive websites, like Slashdot, only reach an average of ~2000 people per million, or 0.2% of the population. So even if a place like Slashdot had posted it, it still wouldn’t have made that big of an impact. Of course part of the slashdot effect is that many other, smaller websites pick up whatever is posted, further disseminating it to the masses. Supposing that doubled the number of viewers, that would still only be 0.4% of the population. [...]
Pingback by polyscience.org » Chain emails and gas prices — September 4, 2005 @ 10:26 am