Ashton Kutcher made my day. Thanks Internet | Hacker News Reader

Ashton Kutcher made my day. Thanks Internet

grumomedia.com

41 pointsgrumo33 comments

I have always been surprised by the relatively low rate of twitter referrers, 13k out of 6 million is like 0.2%, which a similar number to what I have observed, to get noticeable traffic you really need a few big twitter users to mention it and a constant stream of follow on / retweets.

its surprising since I follow a relatively small amount of people and check out most of what they recommend, I guess I am not indicative of the average twitter user

Also keep in mind that most people don't read every tweet. Even people with relatively few follows will let tweets flow by for days or weeks without reading them and just pick up again whenever.

I think another issue is smart phones. This is the type of site that I wouldn't even try to use with a phone...I would want my laptop to view it. Most people get their tweets on their phone, so they are less likely to follow this kind of link when they see it, and they are very unlikely to look back when they are on their computer.

brings up a good idea for a mini feature, is there a service that will make a list of links people you follow on twitter have posted (possibly a nice ui for images/videos etc as well)

would probably take a few hours to code, if I cant find one then I think I will give it a shot

Flipboard.

that looks nice, probably not worth the £800 price mark though :)

feedly.

Don't forget Ashton is going to be on the Twitter suggested users list, which means a large number of his followers will have signed up to Twitter once, followed a few suggested users, then left the site never to return. I imagine people with an "organic" follower list get a higher rate of tweet reads/click throughs.

Something else to note, though, is that a large number of twitter users use twitter clients. This means that the traffic looks direct when it is, in fact, from twitter.

Good point, but I was measuring through bit.ly links, so lost referrals isnt as much of an issue

the mob follow the whims of the star, like kitties following a laser pointer

…except if the laser pointer keeps pointing at things the kitties don't like, they slowly stop following it which makes the pointer sad. So in that way, the pointer is being led around by the kitties in a feedback loop.

I removed this line from the post as I don't want to offend Ashton Kutcher's fans. They are the ones giving my video juice after all!

This confirms my experience as well. Twitter brings very little traffic, even when you get retweeted plenty of times. At most, I saw 2,000 people come over from Twitter. Conversely, I have had 30K+ people come to my blog from a single mention on Reddit.

I think it's interesting that for cases like this, YouTube's analytics are completely useless:

http://i.imgur.com/2COBs.png

I noticed YouTube updates the view account and analytics in intervals of about an hour. The current stats show Twitter traffic but they are still not even close to be as useful as the one provided by Google Analytics. Which is funny because Google owns YouTube.

I'd just like to make a counter point - while it is more trackable and instant these days, celebrity endorsement/trend setting is nothing new.

Celebrities have launched hairstyles, clothing styles, holiday destinations, social trends and sports.

Swimming at the beach wasn't at all common until King George started doing it. The dress Kate Middleton wore for her engagement announcement with Prince William sold out within two days.

What is new is the instant change a celebrity can make, but this unfortunately means the trends tend to last a microscopically short time. 250 years after King George went for a dip at Weymouth, we're still all going to the beach.

[note: humor intended here, not really making a comparison between beach visits and blog visits]

And you just made my day!

That is one incredible product video.

We've been looking to do these for our products but couldn't find anyone to do it. That problem is now solved.

Agreed and bonus points for using a map of Vancouver :)

They say Vancouver is one of the most beautiful cities in the world.. even from the sky, and even in cartoon format. hehe.

We've had really good work done by Adam Garner of Trigger Studios - http://www.trigger-studios.com/

If I was in the market I'd definitely use it.

"... that effortless act sent 13,000 people to go watch a 1:41min video. This means that my video was watched for a total of 365 hours. In other words, with 5 seconds of effort Ashton was able to consume 365 hours of his followers time."

Views != Watching your entire video. Many probably bounced after a few seconds.

I'm willing to bet that using the word "instructional" was detrimental to the tweet's click-through rate.

It looks like I may have unintentionally downvoted this post on my phone -- one of the major downsides of using the same interaction (touch) for clicking and scrolling. I wonder if this explains some of the apparently-unmotivated downvoting seen on HN.

Great writeup, Miguel. Ashton Kutcher Twitter Seconds is a great metric :-)

I should probably write up a blog post about this, but if anyone thinks their website could use an informational video, I'd definitely choose Grumo again, personally.

I actually clicked & watched this and assumed that it was a paid tweet (i.e. you paid him to post it)

Very neat that he just randomly posted that.

PadMapper site is down...a real shame to miss this opportunity.

Fortunately it didn't miss the brunt of it, but yeah it is a shame that it would be down, ever. There are some issues I need to fix with the server to deal with its growth.

you should add those spammy overlay button links to your website on top of the youtube video. seriously, there's no clickable way to get to your site from the video

congrats, but now the padmapper site is unaccessible. ;-)

http://padmapper.com was entirely built by one man, Eric DeMenthon. He must be dealing with the new wave of traffic after Ashton Kutcher posted the link to my video. Wish him luck, he has done a hell of a hacking job to put that site together.

It's back on again. The developer is pretty responsive on twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/padmapper

Should be back up, sorry about that!

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