Slashboinged!

Last week, I wrote a story that in 24 hours hit the frontpages of both Digg and Slashdot, with Blog related firepower provided by the mighty Boingboing.net (ranked number 1 in Technorati, when not knocked off the top by Spamblogs).

What would the overall effect be of such a concentrated assault of traffic? Well, let's check out the main players first:

Digg.com: Ranked 107 in Alexa.
Slashdot: Ranked 172 in Alexa.
Boingboing: Ranked 1,161 in Alexa.

I've been Dugg and Slashdotted before, but never, er, Boingboinged. And it's quite an interesting experience to have all three happen within 24 hours of each other.

For now, here's the bandwidth served up over a four day period:

10/07/06: 3117.11 MB (Digg)
11/07/06: 5232.46 MB (Slashdot, Boingboing, Digg, news sites)
12/07/06: 1078.50 MB (Slashdot, Boingboing reposts, News sites)
13/07/06: 1386.94 MB (Boingboing reposts, news sites)


Day 1: Digg.com frontpage

As you can see, the story hits the Digg.com frontpage and I'm racking up over 1000 uniques per hour for a while there. So far, so good (click all images to enlarge).




With the exception of the 5% for Techmeme and the 31% for "others", the remaining 64% of traffic came from Digg.

I'd have been happy with that on its own. However, within 24 hours of the site hitting the Digg frontpage...




Day 2: Slashdot.org frontpage, Boingboing

While still taking a fair beating from Digg, the story then spreads to Slashdot and Boingboing. Boingboing is a new one on me, but the effects are still being felt as of the 16th of July. The reason? It's not so much the traffic that comes from Boingboing - though it's a nice blast. It's the fact that everyone and their uncle goes off and reposts their content. You then find yourself in a short "quiet period", before all of those sites then hurl their combined traffic at you in one never-ending cavalcade of Bandwidth pain. Ouch. Ouch in a good way, though.

72% of the traffic came from Slashdot, with Boingboing creaking in at 2%. Digg is still hurling a fair bit of traffic through, but for some reason is now flagged under the banner of "other", despite bringing in way more traffic on this day than Boingboing.





Day 3: Boingboing approaching

The Boingboing reposts are now starting to make themselves felt - in addition, the article has started to spread across Myspace itself, and lots of profiles start carrying the story. Many of the Myspace postings are from Boingboing, too.


15% of my traffic still comes from Slashdot - Digg itself has dropped right out of sight, but Shoutwire puts in an unexpected appearance with 7% of the overall tally (and Torrentspy, which reproduces Shoutwire content, providing a further 3%).

As for the 64% - you guessed it, Boingboing reposts. I tried to organise them into something useful, but gave up halfway through. Basically, it's just (what feels like) a never ending stream of websites - some of which might only push through about 8 visitors - but combined, it's quite the buttkicking. And it goes on for days. And days. And more days. In fact, it's still going on. Though I'm not including the whole week on this summary, yesterday I had just over 15,000 pageviews appear out of the blue - all connected to Boingboing reposts. That's pretty impressive, considering the "natural lifespan" of the story had probably died off by thursday.


Day 4: BoingBoing and Shoutwire Tidalwave

....and on it goes.

Though the amount of pageviews / uniques has dropped off, people seem to enjoy reposting this one which means a continued spread across the Interweb.


Shoutwire suddenly goes nuts and gives me 23% of my total traffic for the day. Torrentspy (reproducing the Shoutwire content) leaps up to 10%, Techdirt crashes the party with 5% and the other 46% is mostly Boingboing reposts.



Here is a summary of the unique hits from the 10th of July to the 13th of July:

Day 1: 16172 uniques
Day 2: 22020 uniques
Day 3: 8388 uniques
Day 4: 10220 uniques

56,800 uniques over the 4 days, and 78,491 uniques over the last six.

Over the four days, the traffic divided up like this:

47% - Boingboing, Boingboing reposts, news sites and "regular" traffic
30% - Slashdot
15% - Digg
5% - Shoutwire
3% - Google

Interestingly, the combined forces of Digg, Slashdot and Boingboing (along with everybody else) doesn't even come close to the traffic generated by a single Digg back in January - that thing pulled in 70,000 page views / 40,000 uniques in one day, serving up close to 16,000 pageviews in one hour and something like 5,000 uniques per hour for five hours straight. I then got 34,717 uniques, 27,725 uniques and 15,005 uniques on the days that followed.

At this point, I guess you want to know about Browser stats, right? Can't finish off a traffic summary without it. So, for the record, over the last six days, the most popular browser (by a whopping margin) was:

1) Mozilla, with 20777 users.
2) Internet Explorer, with 7115 users.

Poor old IE. Looks like someone needs to Slashboing it...!

/ Update - Whoops, as a few of you have rightly pointed out, I goofed and placed a "G" where the "M" should have been in the "bandwidth served" section. As the whole point of the article was to show that linkage from the three "big boys" in 24 hours was actually survivable, that's rather stupid. Then again, I doubt anyone actually thinks a short blog entry is going to result in 10,818 Gigabytes served up in 4 days so hopefully no damage done. In any case, this has now been corrected and I have smacked myself round the chops thoroughly.