Code of Doom

I love writing for this blog. It really wasn’t that long ago that I started taking it more serious and try to make time in my day to post new content. Whenever I post a new story, I check my stats within wordpress to make sure that the correct article was posted, see if things are getting recognized, etc. Usually, depending on the time of day/night, after the first halfhour/hour, ill get roughly 20 or so hits. After posting my last article at 11:30pm EST on a Monday, I followed my standard routine to check. I quickly noticed that I was at 250 hits in 30 minutes of posting. Automatically I thought ‘well something is wrong”, then I realized that I was getting a large amount of traffic from Reddit, as it apparently caught some attention there. Now that the time has past and Reddit has forgotten about me, so I wanted to do a “back to normal” article and show what you get whenever your story becomes popular on Reddit.

I remember back when I enjoyed trolling through posts on Digg, I would always get offended if someone blatantly posted on article there to get hits. “They just want ad revenue!”. Other times, I would click an article and get the ‘bandwidth exceed’ message. “Bandwidth exceed” was at least a sign the server didn’t crash, sometimes it would just crash the server. I use GoDaddy, so I wasn’t too concerned about that, but still. Here is how all these things turned out, before and after.

Bandwidth

As you can see, the red is for last month and the green is for this month. I hovered over largest red bar, which totaled roughly 175 Megabytes of bandwidth, to put things into perspective. The smaller green spike was from the previous night after about 3.5 hours (GoDaddy works off of pacific time), which totaled at about a gig of bandwidth. This is what worried me, seeing as I forgot how much my plan gave me for bandwidth. After two seconds of looking, I found out I have 1.5TB a month of bandwidth. However, JUST IN CASE, I installed WP-supercache just to be safe. The final tally on the day turned up to be about 4GB of traffic.

Hits
On average, I get anywhere from 250-500 hits during the weekday. It seems to be the normal that on the weekends, those will drop to about 80-120 hits per day. At the end of the day, I got roughly 22,500 hits in about 18 hours (mind you, I am going of off wordpress stats, and they are on GMT). While I enjoyed the hits, it did make looking at the graph kind of worthless. Speaking of worthless…

Google Analytics
The numbers on Google Analytics are annoying to look at after reddit day. Here is my graph now.

If you look extremely close, you will notice that the “flat line” isn’t really flat. The largest bump on that line accounts for a 595 hit day (largest day prior to this). Since the graph adjusts itself to show all, the 22k day pushed the other days down.

My “Average time on site” went from roughly 1 minute 30 seconds to 22 seconds. I thought that was one of the funniest things. Also I have been trying to get my search engine hits up and have been keeping my eye on that. I was on at roughly 26% from search engines. After Reddit, I went down to 6.96%. Of course, these aren’t doing anything that affect me negatively. They will even out over time, but still. I have to look at them hehe.

Adsense
Now this is what I was really interested in seeing. Over 22,500 hits! I was expecting a “good day” on adsense. Mind you, the highest I have earned in a single day through adsense was a little bit over $5. I figured at the very least, I was about to get a nice $10 day. And the final count was… $4.33! wooo!!

Oddly enough, my page impressions for the ads were a good 7000 hits off from the total amount of page views. My guess is a number of different reasons, but mainly I am assuming that programmers coming from reddit more than likely have some from of adblocker installed or perhaps javascript turned off. However, I used to think people tried shamelessly to get their site on top social sites in order to boost ad revenue. I don’t believe I am proof that it doesn’t work, but it does show not all of them make crazy amounts of money through ads just from reddit/digg/etc.

Random Bits
I have a spam block plugin installed that I have been running for over a month or so. Up until then, I had 22 blocked spam messages. After the reddit day, it had blocked a total of 51 messages. On the annoying side, I can’t see the comments that were marked as spam, so for all I know, they could have been legit comments but marked as spam. Regardless, I had 22 within a month and got 29 in one day.

The RSS feed subscribers went out to 111 after reddit. On average before, they were about 40. Right now, they are down to 54 hehe. While it goes without saying, I had the most comments on that article than on any other, totaling 33 comments. Prior to that, it was 12.

Lastly, the diversity of referrers has increased. I have seen some traffic coming in from twitter, stumbleupon, and google reader (see above). I always submit my stories to delicious, but I will get roughly 10-20 hits from there. The day I released the article, I got about 350 hits from there.

All in all, it was an interesting ride. I had zero expectations of it catching on and I am glad to have the experience. I must say, I did become addicted to monitoring the site the whole time, just watching where traffic was coming from, how much traffic was coming in, checking ad clicked, etc.

Marcel Opinion, Random Notes