Are Product Hunt's featured products still online today?
Fair warning: This is a blog post advertisement for ScrapingBee. The data is still interesting.<p>The most interesting chart is one of the last: Proportion of Failures over time. As expected, more recent product links are less likely to 404 or 5xx.<p>Going back to 2014, almost 1/3 of the featured links give a 4xx or a 5xx response. That’s a lot!<p>More surprising, links as recent as 2020 show a 1/4 failure rate. Those projects basically launched on PH, then shut down shortly afterward.<p>Moreover, this analysis can’t actually account for products that have been shuttered but still have landing pages online. It’s ultra cheap to keep a placeholder “Sorry we’re closed” page online, so I imagine a lot of these projects are shutdown but counted as “success”.<p>Subjectively, this matches what I’ve gathered from watching PH. Getting a PH featured product listing seems to be a badge of honor, but PH users aren’t really interested in using 99% of the products and the submitters aren’t actually interested in building them past proof of concept. Recently, the bulk of postings seem to be advertisements for paid information products or pay-to-join communities.