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March 10, 2012
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Analytics from Hacker News & TechCrunch

So we launched Stride yesterday, and hit both the HN frontpage and TechCrunch within a half hour or so of each other. There was a bunch of learnings on the ops side that I’ll save for another post, but one of the things that I’m really excited about is that we have side by side traffic comparisons between TechCrunch & Hacker News.

Hopefully I’ll get the time to analyze and share more later, including some raw data, but here’s some interesting takeaways I saw:

  • We had ~4500 uniques driven while we were the TC top post & on the HN frontpage.
  • Techcrunch drove a tiny bit over twice the uniques of Hacker News.
  • [Subjective] HN comments were way more insightful, interesting, and helpful.
  • TechCrunch readers stayed on the site ~1 minute 20 seconds longer than HN readers.
  • HN’s bounce rate was ~65%, TC’s was ~32%.
  • HN’s Pages/visit was 2.2, TC’s was 3.4
  • 70% of TC viewers went through to our sign up page, whereas only 30% of HN viewers did.
  • TC had 3% IE, HN had one dude.
  • TC had 66% Chrome, 19% Firefox, 8% Safari.
  • HN had 70% Chrome, 13% Firefox, 12% Safari

Note: I sampled all this data around 10PM yesterday.

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January 26, 2012
Moment.js - javascript date parsing/formatting/manipulating
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January 24, 2012
brain.js - neural networks & classifiers in JavaScript.
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January 22, 2012
Signs you're not building an MVP.
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January 21, 2012

On Content, Availability, and Piracy

The two things that matter to me as a media consumer are content quality and availability. Price is very rarely a consideration when I make my buying decisions - there’s a threshold of quality for my dollar, but if it meets that, I don’t care if it’s $2 or $20.

From the perspective of Old media companies, piracy is about the money. “They’re stealing from us.”

From the perspective of a media consumer, piracy is about availability. “I can watch the movie I want to watch, when I want to watch it.”

Old media is going to keep squashing piracy, and you know what’s going to happen? People are going to follow the availability. Low-budget entertainment that’s widely available is going to take off, and the movie studios are going to be left tilting at windmills.