Bit Revolver

Leon Ho of lifehack.org reflects on the site’s growth from zero to 12,000 RSS subscribers. Looking at his graph of subscribers over time, I wondered about the relationship between the growth of lifehack.org’s subscriber base versus its metrics with regards to traditional web traffic. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of lifehack.org’s subscriber growth versus traffic growth:

As it turns out, lifehack.org’s subscriber growth is right in line with it’s traffic growth (traffic according to Alexa, that is). If you smooth out the traffic spikes from the Alexa traffic graph, the two fit together almost perfectly. I was a little surprised by this, partly because I have never really looked into the general relationship between subscriber growth and traffic growth in websites. I expected the relationship between the two graphs to be much more logarithmic (in favor of web traffic), instead of so linear.

At first I reasoned that the relationship between these two graphs was due to the sophisticated nature of the readership that lifehack.org carries. Lifehack.org is a site that attracts a much more technologically savvy crowd than other non-tech related sites. To investigate this theory I produced the same side-by-side comparison between the subscriber growth and traffic growth for my own Of Zen and Computing. While OZaC is also a technology-related site, its target audience is not the tech-elite, but rather the tech-curious (even though I’m flattered to have had a handful of “tech savvy” subscribers pick up my feed, such as the LifeHacker editors). Once again, I expected a logarithmic relationship between the two graphs, with web traffic growth out-performing subscriber growth by far.

Surprise - virtually the same result as lifehack.org. I’m almost certain that subscription spike in late October was due to one of the major aggregation services suddenly beginning to report how many of its users subscribed to my feed. Because of that, I’m imagining that a more accurate graph would have a much smoother transition between September ‘06 and November ‘06.

Once again I am intrigued, although my lack of an explanation may be all together due to my lack of seasoned chops when it comes to Internet marketing. This is also a completely terrible and unscientific “study”, because I am using three completely different analytics services to measure two different samples of data.