Quantifying the "TechCrunch Effect"

Last week we were very pleased to have YourStreet written up in TechCrunch, widely considered the most influential technology blog out there.  Prior to being featured in TechCrunch, we did some research into the "TechCrunch effect" whereby some websites come crashing down due to the huge spike in visitors referred from the article.

Despite a lot of sites talking generally about their experience getting TechCrunched, we couldn't find much actual data on how many users came to the site, over what period of time, etc.  This didn't give us much to go on, so we made some very conservative assumptions and plowed ahead.

Now that we've gone through this process, I wanted to share our actual data to help other start-ups and entrepreneurs plan for being TechCrunched.  Here's a graph of traffic from TechCrunch last week:

Go got a total of 2,914 visitors from TechCrunch last week, primarily on Monday and Tuesday.  We're still getting about 30 referrers a day from TechCrunch, more than a week after the story was published.

The story was posted to TechCrunch around 4 pm on Monday, Oct. 29th.  The biggest spike came in the first hour after the story was published, when we had about 500 visitors from TechCrunch hit the site.  Another surge of traffic came the next morning from 9am-10am east coast time.  This makes sense since the east coasters had probably left work on Monday before the story had been published, and then read it when they got into work the next day.

Overall we found the TechCrunching didn't place too large a load on our fledgling servers.  It probably helped that we were covered late in the day.  I would assume if we had been covered in the morning west coast time that the traffic surge would have been more concentrated because it would have included more east coast readers.

Thanks again to TechCrunch for the coverage.  I hope this data helps other folks to prepare for being Crunched.

Comments

[Ahmed Farooq]

Interesting ... but ... how many came from their RSS feed (I know I did) and the ancillary effect of people talking about you once they saw TC?

I think the TC-effect is far more spread out (compared to the singular brutality of the slashdot effect).

[James Nicholson]

Ahmed, that's a great point. We didn't have a way to measure people coming in from RSS feeds, so it's hard to know the impact that had.

I absolutely agree that the impact of being covered in TechCrunch goes far beyond the traffic numbers. We saw dozens, if not hundreds, of blog posts that directly quoted the TechCrunch article, so clearly there's a ripple effect.

The purpose of the post, however, was to address the lack of data about the initial traffic spike, which a lot of start-ups are concerned about.

[Adam]

Hey James,
Thanks for this post. We're hoping to get some coverage from TechCrunch, and I didn't even know, order of magnitude, how much traffic to expect. I always appreciate people who post real-world data from their business. Find its the most useful thing a blog can offer, whether it be dollars and sense, traffic stats, or whatever.

What I think's even more valuable here then the actual traffic from TechCrunch, is the quality of entrepreneurs and VCs you'll get.