How CarsForAGrand.com Generated PR and Half a Million Visitors

Good promotion, crappy site. All he is doing is scraping eBay auctions, which makes his results crap, since all of the results are in the process of bidding or haven't met reserve yet.

There is at least one piece of solid gold in this article:

"Ask to speak to the assignment editor when calling TV stations."

That alone will save you days and days of cold-calling failure.

Even if it is just a eBay scraping service, I thought this quote was good: "So to recap, if you have an idea get off your ass and just go for it. The worst thing that can happen is you will learn something new, and you might just succeed beyond your wildest expectations in the process."

"Drew would be calling the news stations, harassing the assignment editors"

That's the key. You can do everything, but there is still an element of 'cold-calling' that's necessary, and sucking up any fear or rejection.

Nice example of generating word of mouth buzz (viral message + good trigger), makes a lot of sense if distribution is a major issue for your product - ie. your market (and competitors) are more active offline...

Not sure if they can keep it up, though.

Neat idea, but how much did it cost him to drive across the country, especially assuming that he normally stayed in a hotel room?

When I travel by driving and stay in hotels it usually costs > $200/day between gas, food, and lodging, so assuming he bought the car for this I'd guess they spent a few thousand dollars for those 500K hits.

A cool idea to be sure (and good job on the local news thing, the spreadsheet/assignment editor is a good one to remember), but was this really all that cost effective?

Funny, I didn't hear of it until I was on HN :)

Tee Hee, it's Fox 69. Actually, I didn't even know that stations like this made it out of the single digits.