My first few major posts did pretty well, but the third one was the real zinger. It got quite a bit of pickup, including lots of link love, ranking #1 on Techmeme, being Slashdotted, and resulting in a few reporters calling me. So what's that worth? Here's the tally.
The post directly received about 20k total hits so far (not counting RSS reads or reads from my homepage), linked from about 500 unique domains. The top 15 inbound referers were:
2836 slashdot.org 958 reddit.com 826 stumbleupon.com 619 del.icio.us 439 google reader 424 groklaw.net 419 techmeme.com 372 blogs.zdnet.com 368 battellemedia.com 324 arstechnica.com 303 gigaom.com 277 valleywag.com 263 bloglines.com 174 newsgator.com 159 dnjournal.com
I didn't rank equally on all of these sites, so it's not a completely apples-to-apples comparison. But still the relative ranks are interesting, since there are some new names sending strong traffic. StumbleUpon looks like it's going to be a winner. Other mentions of StumbleUpon that I've seen in the blogosphere suggest that it's growing like a weed, and is sending strong traffic to featured sites.
This post has also received 179 del.ico.us bookmarks, compared with 344 for my previous bell-ringer post about Google in 2004. The archives do indeed turn out to be worth more than the homepage. Even for my month-old blog, most of the action is in refers to the archived posts, as opposed to readers of the front page.
For reference, my total readership for month one is approx 350k visits for my 40-odd posts. There appear to be approx 1,000 regular weekly readers here after a month, based on measurements of posts with an image which I could track independently of readership medium. This gives a total conversion rate of about 0.3%. Ouch. Converting linkbait hits to readers is hard.
Update: Wait, that's not right. I had the wrong option to my script. I've had a total of 20k inbound referers, out of 60k total visits. Not 350k. This gives a trial-to-reader conversion rate of about 5%. That's not too bad.