Last week I conducted a mini experiment on the NYU social network.
I wanted to see how much traffic I could drive to my site by writing about Clay Shirky’s rant about women. It was not a very strong argument, but it was one that was aimed at opposing Clay’s point (which I am apposed to, but normally would never write about). The variable in question (which I actually learned about in Clay’s class); the piggy back effect in youtube videos. I was testing this effect with blog content.
From this post I was expecting to draw at least 30% more traffic just by piggybacking from Clay’s popularity. Which is a little more than 45 hundred site hits a day.
Its been six days since I wrote a response to his post and noticed a 15% increase in traffic to my blog which was not anything impressive. I assumed that it was all traffic relating to the post, to my surprise I took a look at the my web site page views and as it turns out, my Shakespeare sonnet post got (which I spent no energy on creating) got the same amount of hits! This came as a surprise to me.
So what did cause the increase in traffic to my site? A combination of interest in my Art Robotica Project, and Damien Hirst from a global audience. 25% of my viewers are from other countries. That’s around 200 people a day. Which is pretty interesting.
As you can see, the piggy back effect did not work. The person I targeted to piggy back from, gained my site very small traffic results. What can be said about this experiment, that people actually care about context. A rant is mere thoughts by a person that don’t have heavy research behind them. This is a very good way to start a dialogue. Playing devils advocate is a good past time of Clay’s he mainly does this to make points or in this case, agitate people enough to begin a discussion. The rant was crafted in such a way that he was instigating a group enough to get a response. And the results, although his web traffic does not reflect the effect, where successful. 415 responses out of roughly 4,500 viewers, that’s roughly 10% participation rate! Very good results in my opinion.
“Hitler Finds Out Scott Brown Won Massachusetts Senate Seat” the most popular youtube video this week has around 2.4 million views and around 10 thousand comments. That’s around .00416% participation.
Even though my blog is linked from Clay’s blog via the site “Responses.” The amount of people that actually cared about my point of view towards Clay are less that those who care about my point of view towards the arts and artists. This was good experiment to find out who is actually ready my blog. It seems that people interested in art are reading this right now =)
I guess an other interesting thing a lot of people are starting to realize, is how to make use of the data available on the web. It took me a total of 10 minutes to do all this research and about 30 minutes to write this post. The mount of information available on the web is incredible. If 10 years ago, you asked the Author of a book, how many people bought and/or read their book that same day, they would laugh. Daily information was not available on things like that for people like Authors. If you asked them to publish an article in one hour so that 100 people around the world can see it with in minutes of publishing, it would probably seem like an impossible task.