What I learned from the Contagious Media Contest
Posted on June 23, 2005
Filed Under Pictures |
Delivr managed to stick it out in the Contagious Media Top 10 for the first week, the highest it got was number 6, but it didn’t last and we ended up down in 18th (I was still pleased)…so what did I learn?
Look at the traffic stats for the winning entries and you’ll notice that the vast majority of the traffic comes from a very small number of sites…getting picked up by Collegehumour.com will deliver way more traffic than a 100 regular blogs (A-listers excepted). Delivr did all right to start with thanks to a bunch of links from bloggers, but the gap really widened when the hilarious and viral entries like Forgetmenotpanties.com got picked up by very popular sites…I guess these are the sneezers (in Seth Godins terms) and connectors (in Malcolm Gladwells terms) of the online world…the sites which tip an idea virus over the edge and into the mainstream.
Another point is that email plays a hugely important role in spreading links (duh!)…once a link gets into circulation that will deliver way more traffic than even the most popular sites…check out the stats for forgetmenotpanties.com…those “Direct Request” referrers are mostly people clicking on email links. I thought that Delivr might benefit from email, but I realize now that Delivr doesn’t lend itself to easy and wide circulation…sure users send someone an email, but that’s just one person and recipients arn’t very likely to forward it.
And it doesn’t seem to matter what your URL is. I heard (or read) someone say that all entries should sport their own url because if they used a “contagiousmedia.org” sub domain then everyone will know it is designed for that purpose and wil be less likely to spread it…makes logical sense, but a subdomain sure didn’t hurt in this case…forgetmenotpanties.contagiousmedia.org won by a country mile.
At the end of the day I am pleased with the results. I’d been thinking about Delivr for a while and the contest gave me the push I needed to pull it together…and the real prize for me is that the folks at Flickr liked it enough to add it to their services page as an example of their API in action, stoked :)
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