I don't have enough stats from this post to really tell yet. But when I posted the notes for PG's investor talk in april it was #1 for awhile and the spike in traffic looked like this:
I mean do many more people now visit your blog because you are at the top of the leaders ranking -- even at times when you have not posted something that made it to the front page in a while?
Well, I have seen that my user-sessions on the blog are pretty consistently about 200-300 per day. It actually hasn't changed noticeably as I've moved up the leaders list. I only got a big spike when one of my posts was popular on YC.News. Other than that, my traffic has looked pretty much the same. I also have to factor in that since my free time was working on YC.News, I was no longer writing my own articles - which of course is detrimental to growing blog traffic ;)
4/11 - 300 sessions (581 pageviews)
4/12 - 1,991 sessions (5,660 pageviews)
4/13 - 1,345 sessions (3,609 pageviews)
4/14 - 404 sessions (931 pageviews)
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=12282