Press Esc

How important is the reddit front page compared to the inside pages and the new page?

We decided to find out. We tracked the progress of one of our stories from the New page, through the inside pages (http://reddit.com/?offset=x, where x is 25,50,75, 100 etc), to the front page and then back through the inside pages to obscurity. As it embark on its epic journey, we counted how many users reddit sent our way from each page. The results were hardly surprising, as you can see in the chart below.

The front page sent five times as much traffic as the second page, which in turn sent around three times more visitors to our story. Pages beyond offset=100 receive negligible amounts of traffic. The new page sent more traffic that offset=75 but less than offset=50.

The obvious conclusion is that the reddit front page is vastly more important than the inner pages, but the second, third and even fourth pages can send a significant amount of visitors to an article.