PG: The biggest source of stress for me at YC was running HN

I do wonder what sort of traffic HN gets in terms of Page view. Would HN consider self hosting an analytic like plausible or other cloud solution where the information is public?

These days around 5.5M page views daily and something like 5M unique readers a month, depending on how you try to count them.

pg used to post graphs sometimes using an old Google API where you could supply all the data points in a URL and it would return an image. Edit: like http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=ls&chco=ff7700,000000..., which still works! via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1833276

Wow. Thanks for sharing the numbers. 5M uniques is impressive. That feels like a pretty decent market share of all developers in the world.

Thank god HN doesn’t run paid ads. Otherwise I can see marketers spending crazy money for promoted posts. I hate how Twitter injects promoted posts into my feed. Thank you for keeping the ad-holes away from here.

5M Uniques! 5.5M Daily Views.... This is much much bigger than I imagine.

I sat down and was thinking about these numbers.

Most of the post I could find that share their Data with blog post hitting front page of HN suggest they got less than 100K PV. They do get over 100K aggregate over a few days.

100K Vs 5M. This mildly suggest HN has a very high engagement from its users.

The numbers I mentioned are an undercount because they don't include all the apps and sites that consume HN through the API. When the new API we're working on is released, it will eventually all be in-house and then we'll know. I suspect the numbers will jump quite a bit.