Is the "Slashdot Effect" Fading?
The day that /. pointed to us was like someone lighting a rocket engine under this website. Tragically, PayPal had its legendary outage that day so we missed out on donations (ouch!), but it did broaden our audience and for that we cannot thank them enough.

Business Week Online however feels that the Slashdot Effect is dwindling thanks to more online blogs and an ever growing increase in Web traffic. Here are some interesting highlights from the piece:

"This "Slashdot effect" has rippled through the tech news industry, where higher traffic numbers tend to translate into greater ad revenues. In the past several years, many editors encouraged reporters to pick story ideas that were likely to make it onto Slashdot. Some writers even submit their own stories to Slashdot in hopes of generating more traffic to their home page and earning kudos from their bosses.

"How can this be? The number of news sites Slashdot is linking to has skyrocketed. And that has reduced the impact Slashdot can make on each individual site's traffic. The number of tech news sites, run by traditional media companies, reaches 360 today, up 20% from 300 just one year ago, according to Hitwise. These sites have proliferated following a revival in U.S. online ad spending, which is projected to grow by more than 20% in 2005, to more than $11 billion, according to e-commerce consultancy eMarketer.

"The end result is a watering down of the Slashdot effect. Readers are still jumping from Slashdot to other sites. Indeed, Slashdot probably has more readers than ever, but they're going out into a far larger Internet news world. While their impact on the Web as a whole is still significant, the effect on individual sites or even particular stories is a lot less than it used to be."

Read the full story here. And if anyone wants to get us on Slashdot, we have no complaints about any effect whatsoever!

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