Dynamoo - 10:30 pm on Aug 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

I got Slashdotted - my site usually gets 500 visits a day - suddenly it got 15,000 in a day. The site coped just fine, the landing page was plain HTML and some graphics. The first hour was 1800 hits, or 30 hits per minute.

However, just how *big* the Slashdot effect is depends on your content. Research shows that 200+ hits per minute is possible in the first hour with a popular story, and you'll get something in the region of 10,000 - 50,000 visitors or more.

Uhh I'll just copy and paste some of the analysis I did on my own site:

The message was posted at just before 3am in the morning UK time, which was very late evening in the US. Between 3am and 4am, the site received over 1,800 hits and the traffic remained at over 800 hits an hour for the 12 hours the link was on the main Slashdot page. In the course of 24 hours, the site received 15,806 visitors, compared to the usual level of about 500 visitors in a day. In other words, Slashdot generated an entire months traffic in one day.

There's an interesting knock on effect in traffic demographics:

Prior to being featured on Slashdot, about 58% of traffic came from Google, 4% from other search engines, 10% from other sites and 28% from direct type-ins, bookmarks and mailing list subscribers. Three days after being featured on Slashdot, traffic levels were still more than double that of before, with 30% of traffic from Google, 5.5% from other search engines, 45% from referrals and 19.5% from bookmarks and type-ins. Only 2.5% of traffic overall actually came from Slashdot on that day.

And some notes on visitor behaviour:

Slashdotters tended to view 1.9 pages per visitor, rather than the typical average of 3.2 for normal traffic, however they were much more likely to my site from their own web page. Slashdotters also didn't bother much with advertising on the site - normal visitors were four times more likely to click on one of the ads at the top of the page. In other words, Slashdotters won't make you rich, they don't hang around for long, but if you can impress them enough, then they can give you an enormous boost in terms of web presence.

From my research, the top tips are to make sure that the landing page is static HTML. Keep everything to a minimum. Don't expect to make any money.

Oh yes.. getting into Slashdot is a bit of a lottery. You've got to have really good karma to get a story even considered most of the time, and rejection rates are sky high. But it's quite a blast when it happens :)