First off, thanks again to all our reddit gold subscribers. Your money paid for the extra servers that kept reddit running. [shameless self-serving plug]
To understand the storm we weathered, take a look at our impressions-served-per-hour over the past week:
It the past, we were always operating just around peak capacity, and never could have survived an unexpected surge like that. Still, it was quite a ride — it actually jammed up our internal traffic tracker for a while (sorry if the per-community traffic totals are a bit laggy for the next few days).
Google Analytics confirms our numbers, which is always nice:
We're happy to see that despite all these newcomers (one out of every four visitors yesterday), our overall time-on-site-per-visitor averaged out to a very respectable 11 minutes, 42 seconds. You guys didn't just take a quick peek and leave; you stuck around for a bit and took the tour. And a bunch of you must have liked what you saw, because a ton of you went ahead and created accounts:
Hi, baby redditors! Welcome to the community. Orientation party is over here.
This of course leads to discussions of, well, where did the traffic come from?
To put it another way, completely taking over Digg's front page for an entire day generates about 250,000 visits, or a little under one-seventh of our traffic yesterday. (Told ya we were a big deal.)
If you've been thinking about getting a sponsored link, keep in mind that all of the above translates into a significant improvement in our effective CPM. In other words, reddit ads have better bang-for-the-buck than ever now — buy one today!
Oh, one more thing: Since we don't want redditors to think of the ad box as "The Box of Hate Which I Never, Ever Look At", we've been occasionally sticking little games in there, and as of today, pictures of cute little animals. If you're running AdBlock and sad about all the fun you're missing, here's how to make an exception for reddit.
