Blogature

Now that we’re a few days into the public life of Thinkature, we’ve noticed some interesting patterns in how Thinkature is spreading that we wanted to share. Specifically, I’d like to compare the role that Reddit and del.icio.us have played in our success so far.

When we first released Thinkature, Jon and I ceremoniously bookmarked our home page on del.icio.us. A few days later, that bookmark on del.icio.us started being bookmarked by other people. As far as we can tell, del.icio.us itself was not the proximate cause of people bookmarking us - no one particularly notices what Jon and I bookmark. Before lots of people started bookmarking our site, we first saw lots of hits coming from Paul Graham’s site and a post one of our users made to http://programming.reddit.com. Some fraction of our visitors from those sources bookmarked us and we appeared first on del.icio.us’ popular page and then on the front page of del.icio.us.

I’m not going to go into all our traffic statistics in detail, but I do want to talk about the differences between Reddit and del.icio.us. Our traffic on Reddit came (with a few very minor exceptions) from one page. We did get a lot of traffic, and had some really good feedback in the comments. Overall, quite helpful. We probably would have gotten more hits if we’d appeared on the Reddit home page, but I don’t think it would have changed the overall traffic pattern much.

On del.icio.us, our traffic came from 107 different pages. Of course, most of the traffic came from http://del.icio.us and http://del.icious/popular (our top single referrer). But beyond that, 23% of our inbound links from delicious come from people looking at tag listings and the bookmarks of their friends. What’s more, that fraction of our traffic from delicious continues to increase, even though we’re no longer on the del.icio.us popular list. Combining all those sources together makes del.icio.us more than twice as big as our next largest referrer.

We’ve also found that del.icio.us lends itself to longer-term growth well because people tend to syndicate their del.icio.us bookmarks on their blogs, generating lots of hits from around the internet, even if those authors don’t write about us explicitly. This is really great, and the del.icio.us team did a great thing by making that process easy. If we rolled in all those numbers too, the del.icio.us effect would be even larger. Perhaps 50% of our referred links are a result of del.icio.us-related traffic.

There’s one other bit worth mentioning here. We’ve had lots of traffic from non-English sites. We’re really excited about this, and most of it seems to be a result of del.icio.us. You can see this in action by scrolling through the comments on our bookmark page at del.icio.us. Because Reddit has a more monolithic community, I suspect that its readership is much more heavily English-speaking than the Internet at large. Del.icio.us focuses more on the network effects of users subscribing to each others’ feeds which makes it easier to use del.icio.us in other languages.

This is not to say that one site is better or worse than another. I’m an avid (and happy) user of both, and any company looking to spread the word about their work should be happy to get links from either source. And really, you don’t have a choice. Users will probably submit your site to both sites whenever and however they want.

So, final lessons:

• Del.icio.us isn’t going to make you popular on its own, but if something else does, it can rapidly accelerate the spread of your site.
• Reddit will get you a lot of hits quickly, but it has a more homogenous user base and once you fall off one of the main pages you’re not going to get much more traffic from it.
• Mind your unicode! Even if you’re not planning to target other language markets, sites like del.icio.us (and to some extent Reddit) will get your site in front of people who speak other languages. It’s okay if your site isn’t entirely localized, but at least let people use their native character sets for their own data inside your site. Maybe if you’re lucky your users will offer to help out with the localization job later.

One last note. When we hit the del.icio.us popular page, the title of our front page was simply “Thinkature.” This is the title del.icio.us uses, even if individual users edit it to be more descriptive. Since the popular page doesn’t include any user comments, that title and its popular tags are all users are going to see. I suspect we could have been even more successful if we had a more descriptive title early on. Next time …