I have mentioned before how I get occasional surges of traffic from Stumbleupon.  The page in question was posted in October 2007, but periodically it rises in the ranks of Stumbleupon.

Last Monday, at 4 in the afternoon, the latest ‘storm’ started.   I call them storms, as the usual pattern is a sudden peak in traffic before the page slides into obscurity again.

This time was different however.  What emerged over the last week is a quite remarkable pattern of traffic.  The Monday evening storm developed into one of the biggest since 2007, and instead of subsiding, it developed into a whole series of cycles.

Hourly traffic over seven days

For some reason, traffic drops to a minimum at around ten in the morning before rising to the next peak.

Daily traffic over thirty days

The decay in traffic is also quite remarkable in that it follows a mathematically precise curve.  I took the snapshots a couple of days ago, but the traffic is still following the same very precise pattern.

Monthly traffic over a full year

As the second illustration shows, the quantity of traffic is quite significant too.  In fact the site is receiving more traffic in one day than it would normally receive in a whole week.   Even more startling is that by the 9th, January’s traffic had already created a new twelve month record.

The traffic is still pretty heavy, but the rate of decay has slowed right down.  Mathematically, it is indicating that I can expect a permanent increase in traffic of around 500%.  However I recognize that is extremely unlikely which probably indicates why I’m not a climatologist?