HN Explorer

Ask PG: Unique visitors by country

34 points by terpua ↗ HN
Can you share the percentage of traffic to HN by country?

Curious to know if that percentage is semi-accurate to the real % _of_hackers/country. Anyone have a study/stats? Please share.

19 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 41.0 ms ] thread
xenophanes
I would expect it is skewed towards English speaking countries.
teej
Here's the geographic breakdown of traffic to my site from HN. It's a small sample size, but hopefully it's better than nothing.

United States - 52, Australia - 3, India - 2, United Kingdom - 2, Argentina - 1, Canada - 1 , Israel - 1 , China - 1 , Russia - 1

vinutheraj
Australia > India > UK ... that's interesting !!
carpo
The stats for my site are similar too. Again, only a small sample, but interesting:

United States - 47 Australia - 13 United Kingdom - 8 Canada - 6 New Zealand, Romania - 2 India, Ireland, Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, China - 1

JoelSutherland
Here is the breakdown on our site, 10,400 visits over the last 9 months:

United States - 6,634

Canada - 722

United Kingdom - 643

Australia - 241

Germany - 231

India - 186

Netherlands - 120

France - 107

Sweden - 96

Ireland - 73

nx
Argentina - 1? That's me!
epochiero
No, that's me! I think he's talking about his own site though, not HN.
pg
I have no idea, unfortunately. We've never tried to analyze anything about the traffic except the number of unique visitors and page views per day.

CO2stats would know though, since they keep track of where people are to analyze their power sources. I'll ask them.

Keyframe
have you considered using google analytics?
peregrine
I don't know why he wouldn't have. Google analytic really pushes everything else in the market out just because of the price.
erlanger
I personally avoid tools like these out of respect for my users' privacy. Log analysis is fine, having their data absorbed by Google is not. Also, using GA creates additional lag. Many times have I waited for a page to finish loading with the Google Analytics URL in the status bar.
[dead] mmit
What kind of joker correlates the % of people visiting hacker news to the hackers. You are retarded - don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Its like saying - lets see how many people visit a second grade news site which has a finance section, and that would indicate the geographical distribution of people interested in Finance.

rewind
A good feature for HN would be if someone adds a new account (one minute ago when I checked this one), submits some sort of trolling or moronic comment that gets down-voted a few times (which hopefully this one will), it should be flagged, looked at by an admin, then just purged. Obviously no good intentions with the creation of the account or the comment.
gregoryl
Perhaps it's an inherent problem with HN? Disposable accounts for when you want to say something that may/will be voted into the negatives.

Even so, I don't think purging poor comments is the correct idea. I myself have been learning what is/is not acceptable here by reading said poor comments.

edgarjph
The discussion spawned by the poor comment sometimes more than compensates for the little irritation the downvoted comment brought.
allenbrunson
might be a troll, but i wouldn't 100 percent count on it. if you're new to a site and want to get attention quickly, what better way than to make a trolly-sounding comment that everybody will pile on immediately.

it takes some people awhile to realize that it doesn't work that way around here.

gregoryl
Does anyone have this kind of data? I think we lack a standard definition of what a hacker even is, let alone usable metrics. Prove me wrong if you can, it would be incredibly interesting.
raquo
Alexa says (for ycombinator.com, of which 95% is HN)

USA - 52.8%

India - 12.3%

UK - 5.3%

Germany - 5%

Canada - 3.5%

No, I don't claim it to be accurate :)