When we launched
www.diddit.com, we wanted lots of people to come and try our new social experience guide. But not too many people! Not more people than our servers could handle. To provision our servers, we tried to estimate how many visitors would discover Diddit through our launch press and PR efforts. We sought out launch traffic data from other sites, but we didn't find much publicly available information. In the end, we made our own best guesses based on anecdotes from fellow entrepreneurs and our own previous experiences.
This blog entry contains some basic statistics about the traffic that came to Diddit from the various press and blog articles that were written about our launch. It's the kind of data we were seeking during our capacity planning, but weren't able to easily find. Hopefully it'll be helpful to other folks as they make plans to launch their own sites in the future.
The press and bloggers wrote a number of positive
articles about our launch in mid-February, which brought about 25,000 visitors to Diddit during the remainder of the month. About half of those people came within the first few days. Our launch day is clearly visible in the graph to the right, which shows all the visits to Diddit that came from referring sites. It doesn't include visitors who found us via search engines or visits from the ten thousand pre-existing members of our community (who joined Diddit prior to the launch, during our invite-only sneak peek).
Before the launch, we had the opportunity to pre-brief a number of great publications and tell them about Diddit, our team and our story. We spoke with members of the press at
VentureBeat,
TechCrunch,
CNet News,
Vator.tv, and Dow Jones. They all agreed to embargo their articles and publish them simultaneously at 6pm PST on the evening of our launch (2/11/09). Early the next morning, we put a
press release over the wire to reach a wider audience of publications.
These press events generated two focused bursts of traffic which were the real tests of our capacity planning. The second graph shows our traffic hour-by-hour through the launch. You can see two traffic spikes of about 1,000 visitors per hour resulting from the publication of the embargoed articles and the press release. Interestingly, this graph also shows the final load test we performed just before launch -- it's almost comically small in comparison to the real traffic! Luckily we had enough server capacity to comfortably handle both of these traffic peaks.
After the dust settled, we broke down which sites sent all of these new visitors to Diddit and uncovered a few surprises. The press we briefed directly were responsible for about 5k of the 25k new visitors. Individually, they were some of the largest referrers in our logs. Their articles were picked up by news aggregators and spawned a second wave of follow on coverage which accounted for the majority of the traffic. For example, over a thousand people found Diddit when we appeared on the Delicious popular page on launch day. Google Reader send us about 2k visitors, as people clicked on articles about Diddit in their RSS feeds.
A big thanks to all the folks who helped make our launch successful. We appreciate all the kind words and positive articles from the press and bloggers. Thanks to
Rackspace for racking and stacking our servers and to the folks at
Percona who helped tune our mysql configuration. Thanks also to
Shernaz Daver and the crew at
Future Works who helped us get the word out to the press.
And of course thanks and welcome to all the new users who joined Diddit in the last month! We're just getting started, but we're pretty happy with how things are going so far. Hopefully other folks can make use of this data to help plan a successful launch of their own.
