

Sparkfun Electronic's $100k giveaway hasn't helped traffic in the longterm - ehsanul
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/sparkfun.com

======
phaedrus
I don't think this is a relevant statistic. Sparkfun makes money by selling
items, not page views. There might not even be much correlation between page
views and sales: If only 1% of their page views are actually people buying
things, you could have double the actual sales or half as many and only move
total page views by <= 1%.

------
ehsanul
For some context:

The original announcement - <http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/news.php?id=305>

The aftermath - <http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/news.php?id=322>

I expected traffic after the promotion to be significantly larger, but there
seems to be no effect. So the $100k really had no affect on the number of
customers they have, and though it seemed brilliant at the time, may in fact
be a failure.

The lesson: big publicity which doesn't last long probably won't get you
anywhere.

------
jws
On the contrary, zoom back so you can see November 25th when they announced
giveaway day. Better yet, pull back to "max".

Would one not expect a lull afterward? It was announced far enough in advance
that people could choose to get their upcoming stuff on giveaway day. Maybe
some of the free-getters were new customers who might repeat, but the value
was in the press on November 25th.

------
PostOnce
My intuition tells me that a great deal of the traffic from free day was from
people who don't know anything at all about electronics and simply wanted free
stuff.

Some of them may be in it for resale value, but I know more than a few people
who would take something simply because it is free.

