Coder Weekly has been running for over 6 weeks now, so it seems like a good time to share some numbers. So far, the community feedback has been really positive and we’ve reached 3,000 email subscribers, with another 800 or so on RSS.

Initial Traffic

The first peak in this graph is the submission to Hacker News, and the second is the submission to /r/programming. You can see that, overall, reddit sent a lot more visitors. Due to the ranking algorithm differences of the two sites, traffic from reddit also continued for longer.

Below, you can see how these spikes in traffic translated into new subscribers (y-axis shows new subs/day). You can’t quite attribute all signups to Hacker News and reddit since there were other traffic sources too (e.g. twitter), but it gives a reasonable indication of the conversions.

Overall, well over 2,000 subscriptions occurred from these ~19,000 unique visitors, a conversion rate over 10%. Unfortunately I haven’t run the numbers from the new version of the landing page, so I can’t on speculate whether this has improved the conversion rate.

Finally, the image below shows the number of RSS subscribers, which quickly rose past 800. It was clear from the outset that a large number of readers preferred this, so I’m glad Mailchimp made it so easy to offer.

Ongoing Growth

After each issue, there is an uptick in subscribe rate. It’s great that people are tweeting about Coder Weekly and forwarding the emails. Conversely, unsubscribe rates are extremely low – we’re looking at between 2-5 subscribers per issue.

So, although we haven’t enjoyed the same incredible growth of the first week, there is steady growth that seems to be driven primarily by current subscribers.

Click Data

There’s lots to be said about click rates for different articles. As you’d expect, there is a strong correlation between the position in the list and click rate. The article’s title is clearly an important factor too, with titles that describe an opinion or technique doing well. Below, you can see the top clicked links in Coder Weekly Issue #5.

I intend to do a longer post discussing click data in future, hopefully with some interesting split testing data.

The Future

I hope this brief overview has provided some interesting numbers for those of you who are curious. In future, there are a few ideas I’d like to work on. Providing a separate feed for individual stories is something that’s been asked for many times that I’m still working on, and it would also be illuminating to do some split testing on the landing page.

Finally, a huge thanks to all of you who’ve subscribed and/or given feedback!