What kind of traffic is driven by a single mention of a domain on network TV? | Hacker News Reader

What kind of traffic is driven by a single mention of a domain on network TV?

chrisfinke.com

159 pointscfinke54 comments

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...

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

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?

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.

I'm not sure the experiences are that different. mmastrac says his spike was during the broadcast. But the author of the post didn't own the domain during any of the broadcasts.

He watched the show a half an hour after it aired in his time zone (Central Time Zone). Meaning by the time he even watched the show it had already aired in every time zone but Pacific and he was watching it concurrently with that audience. Assuming he looked into it, registered the site and got it up within an hour or so he MIGHT have had it up for Alaska and Hawaii but that's about it.

And even that's unlikely since Hawaii (http://www.kitv.com/index.html) starts their primetime at 7pm and Alaska (http://www.kitv.com/index.html) has only one station that airs programming from ABC, Fox and the CW.

I registered the domain at about 7:50pm Central time and had content on the site by 8:05; the show had aired at 7:00 Central time, so I was still two hours ahead of the Pacific time zone airtime (10pm Central time).

after this goes off of the front page could you compare that spike with the one generated by having the link on a top comment?

It's still on the front page, but it's probably going to still look like this in the end:

http://twitpic.com/39828p

The TV mention was so many orders of magnitude above our normal traffic level that it's impossible to compare with anything else.

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.

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!

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

Or, simply upvote the comment.

Yeah, it would be a nice feature to be able to browse all the comments you have upvoted like you can do with links.

These numbers sound about right to me. In the UK, with ~2 million engaged viewers, we see around a 1-2% conversion when a URL is mentioned and shown on the screen (off the top of my head 20,000 users in a 30 sec period would be a fair average), typically 3-6% conversion over the course of a 1 hour show.

The important thing is for the website to exist and be online within the 5 minutes of the URL being displayed.

If the presenter reads a URL and also explains some activity that can be done on the site, you can get anywhere from 2x to 40x the traffic that just showing or just saying the URL will create, it depends on the activity and also which presenter is reading out the URL.

Displaying the URL alongside a screenshot or a video of website will net you 4+ times the number of visitors that a simple piece of text displayed or read, but not as much as a presenter telling viewers to go to the website.

A broadcast on a delayed +1 channel gets you 10% of the above traffic.

Wouldn't this depend on how memorable the URL is?

Are there metrics of this?

I'd imagine "Xer3dkasdf.com" would need lots of exposure and a sworn offer of free ponies before anyone would copy it from the screen.

I'll share a anecdote where we had far fewer visitors:

A previous employer of mine was on the Early Show (CBS) doing an interview about our website. The whole interview was about the website -- about 5 minutes long -- several mentions of the domain. Their ratings show about 3mm viewers, and we had a bump of just about 10,000-13,000 visitors that day.

Related: Slate ran an ad campaign on TV and broke down the numbers for anyone interested. http://www.slatev.com/video/how-i-ran-ad-fox-news/ (video link)

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...

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...

- Jan 22: 3269 visits

- Jan 23: 4520 visits

- Jan 24: 2523 visits

- Jan 25: 1540 visits

- Jan 26: 933 visits

- Jan 27: 909 visits

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.

I'm guessing that, in your case, there is a rather specific group of people interested in visiting a URL like that. As a student, I'm not terribly inclined to visit it, for instance, due to its questionable nature (apologies, but it does sound a tad scammy).

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. ;-)

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."

Yup, that seems familiar.

I would bet that a lot of people make mistakes on that long domain and end up not getting to your site.

I was afraid to click it until I figured out what "berich"-ing was...

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 :)

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.

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

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?

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?

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.

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.

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

DNS resolution sadly isn't very realtime.

The DNS propagation delays that matter in this case are the provisioning delay on the TLD servers and the domain's own name servers. If your service provider is good it should be deployed within a few minutes.

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?

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

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.

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).

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?

I thought they were required to do this. Thus all the "How I Met Your Mother" websites. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_I_Met_Your_Mother#Websites)

I remember the HornyManatee.com thing :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Late_Night_with_Conan_O...

"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. "

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.

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

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

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-...

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.

This site: http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2010/11/18/wednesday-final-... shows 9.2MM viewers for that night's episode.

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.

Nitpick alert!

Competetive bearding is not a sport... yet.

It's spelled "competitive."

Can competitive beard nitpicking be far behind?

Fixed, thanks. My IDE even showed it as a misspelling, but I guess I was too high on the rush of getting the site up to notice.

The funny thing is that competitive bearding is a sport: http://www.worldbeardchampionships.com/

Nobody followed @beardguru on Twitter :)

I think you mean :(

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...)

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)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com