Anatomy of Some Slashdottings

I thought I’d share some traffic data from some of my posts that have been published at Slashdot over the years. I’ve been a regular contributor to the site for more than a decade (but nowhere near as prolific as say, TheodP or Hugh Pickens.)

Top Ten Posts

Traffic from a Slashdot post for me has varied from as little as 1,500 page views to upwards of 40,000. Here are my most popular ten posts from over the years:

[fancy_table]

Date	Title	Page Views
Sep ’09	How We Caught Missing Wired Magazine Writer Evan Ratliff (Slashdot) also posted in Wired et al.	45,479
Mar ’15	Hacking Weight Loss: What I Learned Losing 30 Pounds (Slashdot)	40,174
May ’14	You’ve Got Male: Amazon’s Growth Impacting Seattle Dating Scene (Slashdot), also widely posted	37,842
Feb ’15	Ten Lies T-Mobile Told Me About My Data Plan (Slashdot)	34,343
Aug ’06	Microsoft Drops The Ball on Internet Explorer 7 Standards Compliance (Slashdot)	25,026
Jun ’14	Turn on your data for one minute, AT&T sticks you with a $750 international roaming charge (Slashdot), also widely posted by T-Mobile’s CEO, Hacker News, BoingBoing et al.	23,151
Nov ’07	How Can Open Source Software Open Up Facebook? (Slashdot)	21,438
May ’15	Amazon’s Impact on Seattle’s Ballard Neighborhood (Slashdot)	16,867
Dec ’08	Confirmed: Apple OS X 10.5.6 Update Can Break Your MacBook Pro (Slashdot)	16,269
Jul ’09	What to expect from the Apple MacPad: predicting the release of the long-rumored Mac Tablet (Slashdot)	15,915

[/fancy_table]

The page views listed above are all time traffic. The day and week of their Slashdot appearance may vary. It was relatively difficult to go back and get data for some of my older stories. In some cases, I’ve reposted stories from the Internet Archive to this site so they are more easily readable.

I’ve omitted Slashdot stories I posted that link to other websites as I don’t have the traffic data for them.

Here’s an example of daily peaks in my web traffic:

Those two popular peaks in 2015 were Ten Lies T-Mobile Told Me About My Data Plan (Slashdot) and Hacking Weight Loss: What I Learned Losing 30 Pounds (Slashdot).

For the most part traffic rounds out through the month:

My most popular posts of all time have been, ‘Amageddon’: How Amazon’s culture is taking a toll on Seattle’s future (Slashdot), which appeared at GeekWire and Shining Light on Relationship Cutoff, which originally ran on Medium, and provoked a huge controversy which I wrote about in Shining Light on Internet Rage and How to Respond to Internet Rage. Amageddon appeared on the Google News spotlight and I’m told it yielded well over 100,000 page views. My cutoff piece and related pieces have received well over 80,000 page views.

Peak Traffic

The Slashdot story that most surprised me with its popularity was Hacking Weight Loss: What I Learned Losing 30 Pounds. Here you can see peak hourly traffic – maxing out at 5,769 page views. I almost never earn anything more than pocket change from my posts, but many readers purchased the wi-fi scale I used for my weight loss earning affiliate revenue of nearly $400.

Here’s a table:

Scaling WordPress

I’ve written a number of tutorials about how I host my sites. This site runs at Digital Ocean on WordPress with Varnish and WP Total Cache for scaling. These days I also use KeyCDN.

If you have any questions, please post them in the comments below or contact me directly. You can follow me on Twitter @reifman.