Just for fun, I made a comparison with the data from Google Trends:

http://i.imgur.com/T1H1C.png

Google is actually pretty close, although the last few months are off.

Here's (updated) Alexa: http://i.imgur.com/Tw8mh.png

According to alexa "daily reach", traffic from Mar 2009 to Mar 2011 went from reach ~0.0137 to reach ~0.104, so I scaled the Alexa graph to show ~7.9x more absolute uniques in the end than in the beginning.

Thanks for the comparison, I'm actually very impressed by the accuracy of Google trends.

I wonder given the lack of accuracy between quantcast/alexa/compete if there is room in the market for another traffic intelligence site that piggybacks off of Google trends somehow.

[Edit] Looks like its against their TOS: http://groups.google.com/group/google-labs-trends/browse_thr...

Hmm...

Thanks, now I don't need to do that to satisfy my curiosity :-)

What better way to avoid all the compete/quantcast speculative threads than to just post the numbers. Wish we could get that from more hosts for comparative reasons.

Any one know what conversations may have caused the massive spikes on uniques?

The biggest relative spike was when the HN thread about _why became the de facto Internet condolence page.

Can anyone give me the link to this? I've had an extremely eventful week/3 months and I have no idea what this is but suspect I would like to see it.

Thanks.

It's this link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=773106 from 591 days ago. It's the spike in August 2009, approximately doubling the unique IP count. It's less impressive for pageview count, though.

Thanks.

Maybe not a conversation, but an event or mention on mass media that made people interested in HN?

For example, I first heard of HN at an event here in Uruguay (a well known entrepreneur, Nicolas Jodal, mentioned it on his keynote). Probably several other people at the event checked it out too.

The uniques look nicely exponential. I wonder how big the petri dish is, before it gets saturated? I think it's pretty big. Potentially, everyone would like to start a company. And there's arguments that that's how society's going.

Some interesting spikes on the uniques - I'd expect they were caused by something not on HN (e.g. a story in digg or a major newspaper), rather than something on it.

Unfortunately this also means that there's a lot more competition out there and the game's getting harder.

I wonder how much traffic HN is cannibalizing from more traditional tech news sources like venturebeat and techcrunch ... http://siteanalytics.compete.com/techcrunch.com+venturebeat....

Why post a link to compete.com when pg has just discredited as a source for meaningful information?

A similar comparison on Google reflects little change for the others:

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=news.ycombinator.com%2Ct...

That said, it relies on GoogleToolbar/Chrome, but we could argue that it's distribution amongst visitors of those sites is going to be pretty similar.

Edit: Updated to include mashable.com

I agree totally, just was unaware of a better source of traffic data for the two sites. (not every site publicly shares its data as willingly as pg does)

I'll probably be using Google trends in the future, thanks for the heads up.

After looking at the chart (assuming as Swannie does, that Google trends is a significantly accurate source), it seems pretty apparent that HN doesn't have enough traffic to cannibalize significant traffic from them.

Wow, nice graphs, great info, thanks.