

What kind of traffic is driven by a single mention of a domain on network TV? - cfinke
http://www.chrisfinke.com/2010/11/22/what-kind-of-traffic-is-driven-by-a-single-mention-of-a-domain-on-network-tv/

======
mmastrac
We had a brief mention of <http://gri.pe> on The View a little while ago and
we saw an impressive spike (short capture at
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsfuBeSLUCM>). This particular show is on at
least three times: once in the eastern time zone, once in mountain or central
time and once on the pacific.

During the east-coast showing, our traffic spiked. The req/s graph had a 90˚
bend:

<http://yfrog.com/755dmmp>

We saw a spike about half as big for the west-coast showing and the central
showings were half as big again. The traffic from these spikes took a long
time to decay: something on the order of days. Our base level of traffic has
stayed much higher that it was before.

FWIW, our app is built on Appengine and it scaled us flawlessly. Once the
traffic started, AppEngine automatically spun up instances. We peaked at 22
instances, which were automatically started and expired by AppEngine to keep
us running:

[https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/_CqFM7LbtCbY/TNrJSS4B5qI/A...](https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/_CqFM7LbtCbY/TNrJSS4B5qI/AAAAAAAAAvc/JXt_EgollaY/Screen%20shot%202010-11-10%20at%209.33.02%20AM.png)

Another interesting factoid: we paid around US$0.55 to handle the traffic from
that spike.

~~~
erikstarck
Wow, huge difference between your numbers and the beard guy. I wonder what you
can learn from the difference. What was different between the mentions?

~~~
mmastrac
A few differences off the top of my head:

\- We had the domain <http://gri.pe> during the initial showing. From our
data, a significant number of people watch The View live, and most watch
during its first showing in the US.

\- The URL is short and it was written on-screen (we always make sure to tell
people to spell it out so they don't go to gripe.com).

\- People likely watch "The View" for some form of education. They likely
watch "The Middle" for passive entertainment. I imagine they would be more
likely to explore something seen in the former than the latter.

------
Terretta
Hard data from a real client:

On a TV show with 10 million engaged viewers, _each 1 second a URL is
mentioned and shown on the screen translates into roughly 100,000 more
visitors to that URL_. Ten seconds of times translates into one million
viewers.

After that, it tapers off, though additional mentions and showings of the URL
will get incremental traffic, and will spike if discussion says the URL offers
something exclusive.

Audience is roughly 1/4 per segment, <18, 18-34, 35-49, and 50+, with 3/4 at
least some college.

A TV driven audience teaches a lot about scalability.

~~~
ttol
That's amazing data. I'm writing this comment so I can effectively bookmark
this in my profile and reference it again at some later point in time. Thanks
for sharing!

~~~
aw3c2
Please just use your browser's bookmarking feature in the future. ;-)

------
retlehs
I put up www.ibrokemypenis.com for a friend of a friend back in 2008.

On January 22, 2009, Grey's Anatomy aired an episode called Stairway to Heaven
.." in which consultant Mark Sloan - otherwise known as McSteamy - suffered a
fractured penis after indulging in sex in the on-call room with Lexie Grey."

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/4322...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/4322523/Broken-
penis-episode-in-Greys-Anatomy-sparks-frantic-internet-search-among-men.html)

Initially the resulting traffic brought down our Apache server and we had no
idea why so many people were searching for "penile fracture" on Google.

Here's the Google Analytics report for January 2009:
[http://www.ibrokemypenis.com/Analytics_ibrokemypenis.com_200...](http://www.ibrokemypenis.com/Analytics_ibrokemypenis.com_200901_\(TrafficSourcesReport\).pdf)

\- Jan 22: 3269 visits

\- Jan 23: 4520 visits

\- Jan 24: 2523 visits

\- Jan 25: 1540 visits

\- Jan 26: 933 visits

\- Jan 27: 909 visits

------
ramit
This is actually pretty interesting as I've been testing this for the last 2
years. I've been on The Today Show, ABC News (once/week), G4TV, PBS, CBS Early
Show, etc. Most of the time, the anchors/screen will say my domain,
<http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com>.

In general, you will not get nearly as much direct traffic as you would think.
For example, if I showed you the traffic from the week where I was on a
national morning show, you likely wouldn't be able to pick out which day I was
on.

However, media works in very interesting ways. It does affect book sales,
particularly in retail stores. And media begets more media, since producers
watch other TV shows.

But it's very mysterious and much more of a black art than direct
traffic/measurable media.

~~~
acangiano
My first thought was "WOW, they pitch scam sites like that on TV?". Then I
visited your site, and noticed three things.

1) It's obviously not a scam.

2) I'm actually familiar with your name and have even used PBwiki.

3) I own a copy of your book, and it's in my reading queue.

Obviously a domain name can give the wrong impression. ;-)

~~~
mcantor
I hate the title of Ramit's book, because I have to add an explanatory
sentence every single time I recommend it to a friend. "You should really
check out this book... it's called _I Will Teach You To Be Rich_. I know, it
really really _really_ sounds like a scam, but it's actually the exact
opposite. Just trust me. No seriously, really. Please just trust me and get
the book. Come on."

~~~
sachitgupta
Yup, that seems familiar.

------
leviathant
Though I haven't been in charge of a site that's gotten network coverage, one
site I put together was featured pretty heavily on cable news around this time
last year. It all happened really quickly, so I can't separate who came from
the Fox News mention and who came from the 5-minute Rachel Maddow feature, but
<http://www.gonzalescantata.com> was featured on Thursday night, yielding
4,600 visitors, followed by 9,000 visitors on Friday, then 3,900 visitors on
Saturday, 2000 on Sunday. Our average daily traffic leading up to that mention
was about 20 visitors. It took about three weeks for the traffic to taper back
down to 20-30 daily visitors.

For a few hours on Friday night, "Gonzales Cantata" was the #1 search in
Google Trends. Not bad for a concert opera about Senate Judiciary hearings
(it's actually much more interesting than that might sound)

I realize the topic is about a network television appearance, but I figure it
can't hurt to add some related information into the pile :)

------
ethank
I have an artist on Oprah today, so I'll post a snapshot of the MRTG and Cacti
graphs after. The "Oprah Effect" is very strange, as its three timezones with
differing behavior.

~~~
ethank
MRTG was thrown because of activity on other sites, but here's the online user
count during Oprah, relative values:

This is east coast feed. Central feed and PST feeds are often more.

<http://imgur.com/lrgcs>

------
zach
Worth pointing out that many people use Google for even the most trivial of
site visits. Many may have skipped the .com and entered "beard guru" into
Google, where at the moment I don't see beardguru.com on the first page of
results.

I wonder: for those who have experienced traffic spikes based on domain
mentions -- how much of the traffic was direct?

------
dlokshin
Ironically, beardguru.com will get 10x the amount of traffic from being on the
HNews front page. Moral of the story, HNews more influential than ABC?

~~~
Splines
IMO, the comparison would be valid if beardguru.com was running an ad on HN
(or if ABC's episode was all about beardguru.com, instead of a offhand comment
by a character).

Also, most of the traffic from HN would probably stop at chrisfinke.com.

------
aw3c2
1) the site was not live when the domain was mentioned.

2) DNS needs to propagate or it will still not be live for people for a period
of time (not sure what real delays for that are nowadays, but surely minutes
to hours.

~~~
wwortiz
Depending on the isp (since most people don't change dns servers) it can even
take days.

DNS resolution sadly isn't very realtime.

------
asmithmd1
Did anyone else get a bad feeling in the pit of their stomach when "The
Office" plot revolved around everyone getting rich by investing in wuphf.com

When something reaches pop culture can the bubble popping be far behind?

~~~
mariana
I thought the same thing. Very hilarious episode, nevertheless.

------
wildmXranat
My client had mentions on major networks in Canada. It's a local business and
mentions on CTV, GlobalTV and CityTV each produced a spike in site views.

Without posting any screen caps, the initial waves began within hours after TV
posts and sustained above than average number for 7-14 days after.

After the three mentions, one on each network, the average about doubled and I
know that it affected the business substantially. Walk in customer numbers
have increased and almost doubled over 6 months.

Initially, the TV spots didn't produce paying/inside the door customers.
Before doing any publicity work to initiate the spots, we made sure to
traceback any new customer on how they heard about the business. Word of mouth
from those that seen the spots was the biggest marker. I presume that once
someone sees something on TV, it adds validation to their suggestions and we
were recommended more often.

------
rwmj
Back in 2006 I was running Google AdWords for a mortgage company on keywords
around self-certification mortgages (yes, sorry, I was one of the people
responsible for the crash :-)

These (at that time) sold for about £5 per click for a top 1 or 2 position,
and the mathematics of it was that you could just about make a profit at that
price as long as your website was very efficient at converting people to
calls. Because of the high price and sensitivity, my pager was set to go off
if we had a sudden "run" on particular keywords.

To cut a long story short, we got something like 10 clickthroughs within a
short period, around 10 minutes, causing my alarms to go off.

We tracked it back to a brief mention of self-certification mortgages by Sarah
Beeny on a Channel 4 property program at exactly that time (this was before TV
on demand).

------
ronnoch
Hmmm, I thought the TV networks had a policy of buying domain names mentioned
on the air. Didn't NBC have to buy a bunch of unregistered domains that Conan
mentioned a few years back?

~~~
GFischer
I remember the HornyManatee.com thing :)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Late_Night_with_Conan_O...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Late_Night_with_Conan_O%27Brien_sketches#Horny_Manatee)

"Conan, in an ad-libbed statement, mentioned that the character appeared on
the, at the time fictitious, web site "HornyManatee.com". The next night,
Conan told viewers that if he mentions a web site which doesn't exist the NBC
corporate policy is to buy the domain name lest someone else use it and
potentially make NBC liable for the site's content. Conan said Late Night
decided to use the domain name to create an actual web site, giving it the
appearance of a fake porn site. "

------
loumf
I have a friend who is a political blogger and sometimes a talking head on
CNN/MS-NBC. They show his URL under his head while he's commenting on stuff.
He claims that the traffic spikes are within the noise. Granted, he might have
high enough traffic, so that these mentions can't generate enough extra.

------
asb
HN users contributed some interesting datapoints to a discussion about scaling
in preparation for a mention on Oprah:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1767637>

------
AlexC04
Good for you! I saw that mention and thought the exact same thing. Even said
to my girlfriend "You know what, I should go over and buy beardguru.com right
now just for fun"

I'm really glad that someone did and that we all get to hear about it.

Based on the performance of the rest of my projects, 500 visitors would be a
dream! On the road to easy street baby :D

------
LiveTheDream
It depends who mentions it. Oprah gave a shout out to Groupon and that brought
enough traffic to take the site down.

[1] [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/19/oprah-ups-
groupons-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/19/oprah-ups-groupons-
kiva-d_n_786043.html)

------
erikstarck
How many viewers does this show have? I'm guessing it's about 5 million. That
means about 0.01% went to the site. Makes you wonder how many people go to a
web site after seeing a commercial.

~~~
cfinke
This site: [http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2010/11/18/wednesday-
final-...](http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2010/11/18/wednesday-final-
ratings-modern-family-criminal-minds-adjusted-up/72722) shows 9.2MM viewers
for that night's episode.

------
protomyth
Apple's Download page (when it was on the front page) was good for 9,000 hits
on the first day it appeared for a non-staff pick.

------
GavinB
Nitpick alert!

 _Competetive bearding is not a sport... yet._

It's spelled "competitive."

~~~
robinhouston
The funny thing is that competitive bearding _is_ a sport:
<http://www.worldbeardchampionships.com/>

------
elvirs
Nobody followed @beardguru on Twitter :)

~~~
cfinke
I think you mean :(

------
zackattack
The TV show Shark Tank wanted to feature me and my company
<http://www.AwesomenessReminders.com>. However, in addition to whatever the
"shark" investors on the show demanded, ABC/Mark Burnett Productions wanted 2%
equity in my company or 5% of annual profits (their choice, to be exercised
whenever) in exchange for featuring me on ABC. I declined.

(I spoke with the guys from another company featured on the show; they said
traffic doubled with the on-air mention, and then reverted to normal the next
day. Totally not worth it...)

~~~
cdibona
It's almost never worth paying for this kind of television. Both at VA Linux
and every company I've worked at since has had bottom feeders trying to get us
to buy access to such gems as 'buntings window' for ridiculous sums of money.

You're always better off just buying text ads. (disclaimer: work at google,
loves text ads)

